Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [71]
So Bertillon did so, selecting body parts to measure that he felt were least likely to change as a person aged. In the final version of what he called anthropometry, but became better known as bertillonage, eleven measurements are used. These fall into three categories:
1. Body: height, width of outstretched arms, and sitting height.
2. Head: length of head, breadth of head, bizygomatical diameter, and length of the right ear.
3. Limbs: length of left foot, length of left middle finger and left little finger, and length of the left arm from the elbow to the tip of the outstretched middle finger. Bertillon favored making measurements on the left side because that side was least likely to be affected by work.
Bertillon calculated that the chances against all eleven points being found in any two individuals was 268,435,456 to 1. For him, that was not quite certain enough, and so he added three more points — descriptive, instead of those, like the first eleven, that could be obtained by scientific instruments. These were the color of the eyes, the hair, and the pigmentation of the skin.
Around this time, Bertillon met an attractive woman who asked for his help crossing the street. There comes a moment in most men’s lives when they manage, if only momentarily, to shed their natural awkwardness and social ineptitude. This was Bertillon’s. He commented on the woman’s accent and learned that she had been born in Austria. She said she had only recently arrived in Paris and was earning a living by giving German lessons. Bertillon replied that he had long wanted to learn German. And so…
The young woman’s name was Amélie Notar. During the course of his German lessons, Alphonse noticed that her handwriting was unusually small and neat. Bertillon’s own reflected his physical awkwardness, making his task of filling out cards at the department even more onerous. When Amélie learned of Bertillon’s hope to one day introduce his system to the police files, she offered her assistance. Her clearly written cards made possible the next step of bertillonage — finding a way to classify the descriptive cards so that they could be easily referenced. Bertillon’s niece, who wrote a biography of him, commented on their collaboration: “For him the thought; for her the action.” 9
Now he was able to solve the problem of classification. Random filing of the cards would, of course, produce no benefits once the number of cards grew, so Bertillon had to come up with a cascading system of options. He began with the length of the head. The resulting measurements (like those of all eleven physical dimensions in Bertillon’s method) were divided into three groups: small, medium, and large. The process was then repeated with the breadth of the head, producing nine groups (three squared) — and so on through seven of the eleven measurements. The cards were further divided by seven gradations of eye color, defined by Bertillon. These may seem like a lot, but in practice it was actually a fairly rapid process, once a subject’s measurements were taken, to find the file in which his card would be found, presuming that he had been measured once before. “A criminal could be measured, looked up and identified in a matter of minutes,” according to one modern authority. 10
Increasingly impatient, Bertillon occupied his spare time taking prisoners’ measurements and recording them, preparing for the day when he would be allowed to show what he could do for the police. He began to enhance the value of the cards he was still making (using the tried-and-true descriptive method) by affixing to them photographs of the prisoners. This had been done on an irregular basis before, but Bertillon saw the need to standardize the poses; he originated the front-