history

This page considers the history of biometrics, from bertillonage to retina scanning and beyond.

It covers -

• introduction - why bother with an historical perspective?
• trajectories - what has driven the history of biometrics and some pointers to historical overviews
• metrification - standardisation, statistics, biometry and biometrics in the Enlightenment and Victorian eras
• fingerprinting - the golden age of biometrics?
• geometries - electronic data capture and pattern recognition
• magic bullets in the war on terror? - contemporary developments as a reflection of concerns about terrorism and identity theft

    introduction

Considering the history of biometrics is of value because it offers insights into both identification/authentication issues and into the way that biometric mechanisms have been marketed and implemented over the past 120 years, with -

• advocacy by enthusiasts, whose infactuation with a technology or an attribute has on occasion led to claims that a particular biometric offers a 'silver bullet' for problems that it cannot - and should not - fully address
• opportunism by researchers, institutions and government agencies, evident in funding of particular studies or initiatives and use of a technology to legitimate an organisation whose mandate is under challenge
• an interaction of policymakers, commercial promoters and the media that results in inappropriate expectations about the scope and efficacy of particular solutions
• proposed universalist implementations - eg mandatory fingerprinting of all people or social groups - that conflict with widespread social values (eg privacy) and are tied to transitory anxieties or threats such as the anarchist menace of the early 1920s
• normalisation of some technologies, which have 'disappeared into the background' and for most people only reappear as a plot device in pulp fiction

    trajectories

Although modern biometrics centres on electronic data acquisition, analysis and transmission - in particular the use of pattern recognition algorithms for automated matching - its origins date from before the telegraph.

Elsewhere on this site we have thus pointed to cow nose prints and human foot prints as prototypes of the modern fingerprint, mechanisms that arguably were more significant in retrospect rather than in day to day practice.

Contemporary biometrics is attribuble to -

• the emphasis on identifying and in particular quantifying the natural world that gained pace during the Enlightenment and resulted in developments such as the metric system of measurement
• an increasingly sophisticated statistics-based conceptualisation of physiological and social phenomena during the Victorian and Edwardian eras that led to the opinion polling industry and social science breakthroughs such as the Kinsey reports
• awareness of that unique (or nearly unique) physiological and behavioural characteristics could be identified on an individual by individual basis
• an increasing capacity in recent decades to express those characteristics in digital formats and to use pattern recognition software in processing collections of such information.

There has been no comprehensive historical account of biometrics.

A perspective is provided by Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices since the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2001) edited by Jane Caplan & John Torpey and by the latter's The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship & the State (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2000). Other works on passports and travel control are highlighted here.

For policing see in particular Marie-Christine Leps' Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse (Durham: Duke Uni Press 1992) and The Criminal and His Scientists: Essays on the History of Criminality (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2003) edited by Peter Becker & Richard Wetzell.

Other works and practices are discussed in the more detailed Identity & Identity Crime guide elsewhere on this site.

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