The Barometer Online

Professor Ken Alder of Northwestern University, Ill. gave his lecture to a group of about 40 faculty and students on Thursday. He started with an event that took place in France in 1569 when a clerk to the king of France was executed for forging the sovereign's signature. Ironically enough, the clerk, Pierre Hamon, had been holding an office requiring him to ... sign documents in lieu of the monarch. While it is more likely that he was executed for being a Huguenot, his trial is remembered as having resulted in the birth of the guild of handwriting masters.

Forgery was a capital offense at the time, and not only when the king was involved: cultural standards made it a particularly heinous crime for an individual to impersonate someone else, explained Alder. The signature on documents was extremely powerful culturally because it was representative of the person's bodily presence.

Fast forward a hundred years, Jean Maillard, who had purportedly died, came back to Paris after an absence of forty years and claimed to have been married to the recent widow of one of the era's richest men. If his claim was true, she would have committed the crime of bigamy and would not be entitled to her late husband's fortune; her son would be a bastard. This is where the guild of handwriting masters comes into play. Their role? To give expert advice on the sole piece of evidence available to the court, a comparison of the signature applied by Maillard on his wedding license and his current signature.

At this point Alder showed slides of both signatures and polled the room on whether they thought both forms had been signed by the same man or not. One person decided they were one and the same, and about a dozen voted to the contrary.

Although he didn't live long enough to hear the verdict, the courts sided with yesterday's solitary voter, deciding that Maillard was the man he had claimed to be. Their decision was based solely on the judgement of those handwriting masters.

Another 300 years later, the infamous Dreyfus affair was decided upon the judgment of handwriting experts, although in his case they went to great lengths to find similarities between the bordereau document and Captain Dreyfus' handwriting. One of the experts for the prosecution even arguing that the two didn't match because Dreyfus was attempting to forge his own handwriting in order to disguise it.

Dr. Robert Nye, who alternates organizing the series of Horning lecture with his wife Mary Jo, said that he picked Alder because of his versatility and wide-ranging interest in the history of science. Alder inaugurated a new facet of the lecture series by being the first speaker to stay at OSU for a full week, participating in meetings with faculty and students and holding office hours, said Mary Jo Nye. Their goal is to have one of the lecturers each year come to OSU as a visiting scholar and give a series of lectures instead of the single-lecture format that is current policy.

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