Page 119 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Bertillon’s system was in wide use in France by 1884, and introduced for use in the USA by 1887. His system had two important legacies - the Mug Shot - and the idea that biometrics offer conclusive proof of identity (an idea given further expression in finger-printing, and later in other biometrics such as voice-identification, eyeball-recognition (iris-recognition), behaviour patterns, hand-geometry and face- recognition software. Of course systems like Bertillonage were not just used to catch and identify criminals, in Czarist Russia the Okhrana secret police used similar techniques to identify dissidents, protesters and members of revolutionary factions. An extreme use of biometrics (iris-recognition) in consumer-society was illustrated in Speilberg: Minority Report (2002) - a satirical vision of a totalitarian consumerist culture gone mad (thanks, Steven and Philip K. Dick!)
And, there was another aspect of modern media that Bertillon seems to have pioneered: the fusion of photographs and data via the card index and the filing system.
Bertillon card-index (1879) and ‘filing cabinets’ 1893-1895. With the growing escalation of paper-work as businesses, organisations, and government bureaucracy (civil service) grew in the 19th century, so the corresponding paper-management systems evolved from the ledger-based past to deal with paper storage and retrieval. The history of paper-management before the invention and patenting of various card-index filing systems has not been studied. However two patents for different card-index filing systems were made between 1893-1895 - for ‘flat’ and ‘vertical’ files - and this must have been preceded somewhat by Bertillon’s ‘filing system’ - which I think was the earliest to integrate biometric information, police notes and photographic ‘mug-shots’ to systematise police-records and to aid in recording criminological data. It must have been in fact, a ‘database’ system in all but name. By the 1910s, information-storage and retrieval systems were described and developed by the Belgian information-design expert Paul Otlet and his colleague Robert Goldsmith who proposed livre- microphotographique as early as 1906.
Otlet and Goldschmidt argue that from the perspective of the academic researcher and scientist, books are not the best ways of storing and archiving information because “access to the libraries is not always easy and delays in the transmission of books often discourage the most tenacious workers, to the detriment of scientific progress....Travel by scholars, the international exchange of scientific books between libraries, the copies or extracts requested from abroad, are seriously under-resourced.” In the Livre Microphotographique, they describe in detail how a postcard-size sheet of film could easily store every page of a 72-page book. Of course, by the 1930s, when Otlet, the great founder of the art and science of documentation (information processing) proposed a global photo-electronic library he called the Mundunaeum, that researchers would access via telephone, and (he speculated) eventually by television too. This was a photo-mechanical, electronic prototype for the kind of ‘Permanent World Encyclopedia’ or colloqually a ’world-brain’ that H.G. Wells described in his 1936-1938 papers for the Royal Institution in the UK, for the Encyclopédie Française, and for the Congrés Mondial De La Documentation Universelle in 1937. Between them Otlet and Wells envisaged the inevitability of the Internet and what Tim Berners Lee called the World-Wide-Web in 1989-90. That these ideas were put forward on the cusp of the invention of modern digital computing (the Turing Machine proposed in 1936), is one of those wonderful world-changing coincidences that amaze us.
But back to the 1880s: It’s not known when the Csarist secret police (the Okhrana) began to use photo- identification systems, but they had a powerful secret presence in Paris in 1883, where around this time - no doubt inspired by the effectiveness of Bertillonage, they began using private photographic studios to build-up their own photographic ID system, later also adopted by the Soviet Cheka secret police from 1917.