History
The version of the passport invented by King Henry V of England is considered by some to be the earliest identity document.
Photographs began to be attached to passports and other "photo IDs" in the early decades of the twentieth century, after photography became widespread.
Before World War I, most people did not have or need an identity document.
The shape and size of identity cards was standardized in 1985 by ISO/IEC 7810.
Some modern identity documents are smart cards—they include a difficult-to-forge embedded integrated circuit—standardized in 1988 by ISO/IEC 7816.
Read more about this topic: Identity Document
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)