Alphonse Bertillon

In the Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventures of the Naval Treaty, Sherlock Holmes tells Watson that he admires the French policeman Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914). Bertillon had developed a new way of identifying criminals using thousands of photographs of different parts of their bodies”.

Bertillon was a French police officer and biometrics researcher who applied the anthropological technique of anthropometry to law enforcement creating an identification system based on physical measurements. Anthropometry was the first scientific system used by police to identify criminals. Before that time, criminals could only be identified by name or photograph. The method was eventually supplanted by fingerprinting. Bertillon is referenced in the Sherlock Holmes story The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which one of Holmes’ clients refers to Holmes as the “second highest expert in Europe” after Bertillon.