Today, the measure of a man. The University of Houston's College
of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created
them. Imagine you're a law enforcement official in 1880. While
booking someone who's broken the law, you ask yourself, "Haven't
I seen this person before?" Checking name records isn't enough,
since repeat offenders tend to lie. Today we rely on
fingerprints and DNA tests. But that wasn't the case in the late
nineteenth century. So we measured things, thanks to the work of
Alphonse Bertillon. Height. Foot length. Ear size. Depth and
width of the head. Bertillon called this method of identifying
people anthropometry — literally, "human measurement." But it
was popularly known as Bertillonage. Bertillon came from a
family of measurers. His father was the chief of the Bureau of
Statistics in Paris, and he kept a slew of calipers, gauges, and
other instruments at the family home. Bertillon's older brother
helped found the Inte