Issue 5 Evil Winter 2001/02

What's in a Name

David E. Brown



For centuries, identity was a fairly simple process, closer to God's Burning Bush tautology—"I am that I am." You were so and so, who had this seal and this family and these church birth records. Signatures helped—they've been around since Roman times, presumably as substitutions for seals—as did hereditary last names, which were a French and English invention around 1000 A.D. As the Renaissance brought economic and cultural progress to Europe, and people—especially merchants—started to move around more, rulers became more interested in keeping track of their subjects. New forms of ID arose.

Until the end of the 19th century, notes Alain Corbin, "a clever person could change identities at will."1 A new town, a dead person's birth certificate, and maybe a strong resemblance to someone, and poof, you were him. Modern bureaucracies, new technologies, and the application of scientific methods to social problems put an end to this free-for-all. Bertillon's system of cranial measurements started the move to definite ID; that was superseded by Scotland Yard's fingerprinting system, which in turn is being replaced by ever-more-specific ID technologies such as iris scanning. Through all of these changes, though, the signature has remained the accepted proof of who you are.


Enter the teleautograph, the 1888 creation of Elisha Gray, who had famously lost the race to patent the telephone by a few hours. It's not clear exactly why Gray thought transmitted writing would be better than transmitted words. But it didn't take much for a 19th-century inventor to start inventing. Once he got it working, his teleautograph wowed the crowds at the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition. Here's how it worked: The transmitting person moved a writing stylus across a metal plate; its movement was measured by potentiometers. The varying levels of electricity put out by those components were transmitted by wire, just like a telegraph; the receiving instrument translated those levels into the motion of a pen-holding armature. Handwriting and signatures were finally moving through the wires.

The teleautograph never worked well over long distances, and within a couple of decades the telephone and speedy mail system had a firm hold on personal communication. But the dream of a machine that could "prove" a writer's identity reappeared after World War II with the Autopen, made for people whose signatures were in great demand.


The Autopen was a lifesaver for important men. But the Autopen undid some of the progress that had been made in identification. Your signature, with its practiced flourish, is as close to you that writing can get. "I am that I am," your signature wants to say. And that closeness-to-you is what convinces governments and banks and landlords that you are who you claim to be. But how can that certainty exist along with a machine that can sign and sign and sign, with no care as to who has told the machine to sign? (It can't, as evidenced by a series of unauthorized, autopenned Donald Rumsfeld signatures that appeared on official documents in early 2001.2)



  1. Alain Corbin, "Backstage," in Michelle Perrot, ed., A History of Private Life, Vol. IV (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1990), p. 469.
  2. "Clinton-Cohen Holdovers Push Liberal Agenda at DoD," CMR Notes (May-June 2001), at (link defunct —Eds.).

