The history of identification 

Have you been asked lately to prove who you are? If so, you probably were not surprised when it happened. There are a lot of situations where you have to do that. When opening a bank account, checking into a hotel, getting on a train or plane, or taking an exam, you are required to present your ID card, passport or school card. You even need a PIN or fingerprint for authentication before you can access apps on your cellphone. Identification has become part of our daily routine. But do you know this requirement can be traced back thousands of years? As early as about 300 B.C., Shang Yang, an important statesman in ancient China, invented the first known “ID card” called zhaoshentie (照身帖). This was a bamboo slip with the person’s basic information engraved on it. In England, King Henry V issued travel documents in the 1410s for his subjects who needed to prove their identity while in foreign countries. This is thought to be an early form of “passport.” Photo ID cards, using the technological advancement of photography, were used for the first time at an exhibition in Philadelphia, USA, in 1876. Barclays Bank in London in 1967 became the first place in the world where people could withdraw money from an ATM using a PIN. When biometric technology emerged, physiological and behavioral features could be used to identify a person. In the 1980s, DNA testing was used for the first time in a criminal investigation, and in the 1990s iris recognition technology was used for commercial purposes. In 2013, the Apple company incorporated fingerprint recognition into the iPhone 5S and since then, identifying a person through fingerprints has become commonplace. Scientific and technological advances mean new ways of identification will appear in the future.