Associated Content has an interesting article on the history of biometrics. Coverage of more recent updates is only briefly touched on, while some more interesting tidbits from years gone by are dusted off and shared.

“Identification of a person using their physical traits has been around for centuries. Even before the advent of photography, a good sketch artist could make a likeness of one’s features, usually if they were a criminal, and send it to others who could then use it to identify the criminal who had migrated to a different town.

Identification in the West relied heavily on “photographic memory” for many years before Alphonse Bertillon, a French police desk clerk and anthropologist, developed an anthropometric system (system of measuring human physical traits such as strength, size, reach, and mobility) of identification in 1881. The first precise scientific system widely used to identify criminals, the anthropometric system turned biometrics into a field of study.”

Read the rest of the article here.

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