With the present-day knowledge of writing in its various phases, the identity of forged, fraudulent or simulated writing can be determined beyond the possibility of a mistake. Every year sees an increase in the number of important civil and criminal cases that turn on questions of disputed handwriting.
There is not a day in the year but what bank officials are at sea over a disputed signature and a knowledge of how to test and determine genuine and forged signatures will prove of inestimable value to the banking and business world.
Forgery is easy. Detection is difficult. As the rewards for the successful forgers are great, thousands upon thousands of forged checks, notes, drafts, wills, deeds, receipts and all kinds of commercial papers are produced in the United States every year. Many are litigated, but many more are never discovered.
Practical and useful information about signature writing and how to safeguard one's signature against forgery is something that will be welcomed by those who are constantly attaching their names to valuable papers.
Every man should guard against an illegible signature—for example, a series of meaningless pen tracks with outlandish flourishes, such as are assumed by many people with the feeling that because no one can read them, they cannot be successfully imitated. Experience has demonstrated that the easiest signatures to successfully forge are those that are illegible, either from design or accident. The banker or business man who sends his pen through a series of gyrations, whirls, flourishes and twists and calls it a signature is making it easy for a forger to reproduce his signature, for it is a jumble of letters and ink absolutely illegible and easy of simulation. Every man should learn to write plain, distinct and legible.
The only signature to adopt is one that is perfectly legible, clear and written rapidly with the forearm or muscular movement. One of the best preventatives of forgery is to write the initials of the name—that is, write them in combination—without lifting the pen. It will help if the small letters are all connected with each other and with the capitals. Select a style of capital letters and always use them; study out a plain combination of them; practice writing until it can be written easily and rapidly and stick to it. Don't confuse your banker by changing the form of a letter or adding flourishes. Countless repetitions will give a facility in writing it that will lend a grace and charm and will stamp it with your peculiar characteristics in such a way that the forger will pass you by when looking for an "easy mark." Plain signatures of the character noted above are not the ones usually selected by forgers for simulation. Forgers are always hunting for the illegible as in it they can best hide their identity.
It is said to be an utter impossibility for one person to imitate successfully a page of writing of another. The person attempting the forgery should be able to accomplish the following: First, he must know all the characteristics of his own hand; second, he must be able to kill all the characteristics of his own hand; third, he must know all of the characteristics in the hand he is imitating; fourth, he must be able to assume characteristics of the other's hand at will. These four points are insuperable obstacles, and the forger does not live who has surmounted or can surmount them.
To understand the principles on which an expert in handwriting bases his work, consider for a moment how a person's style of writing is developed. He begins by copying the forms set for him by a teacher. He approximates more or less closely to these forms. His handwriting is set, formal, and without character. As soon as he leaves off following the copy book, however, his writing begins to take on individual characteristics. These are for the most part unconscious. He thinks of what he is writing, not how. In time these peculiarities, which creep gradually into a man's writing, become fixed habits. By the time he is, say, twenty-five years old, his writing is settled. After that it may vary, may grow better or worse, but is certain to retain those distinguishing marks which, in the man himself, we call personality. This personality remains. He cannot disguise it, except in a superficial way, any more than he can change his own character.
It follows that no two persons write exactly the same hands. It is easy to illustrate this. Suppose, for example, that among 10,000 persons there is one hunchback, one minus his right leg, one with an eye missing, one bereft of a left arm, one with a broken nose. To find a person with two of these would require, probably, 100,000 people; three of them, 1,000,000; four of them, 100,000,000. One possessing all of them might not be found in the entire 14,000,000,000 people on earth. Precisely the same with different handwritings—the peculiar and distinguishing characteristics of one would no more be present in others than would the personal counterparts of the authors be found in other individuals.
It is more surprising, at first thought, to be told that no person ever signs his name even twice alike. Of course, theoretically, it cannot be said that it is impossible for a person to write his name twice in exactly the same manner. A person casting dice might throw double aces a hundred times consecutively. But who would not act on the practical certainty that the dice were loaded long before the hundredth throw was reached in such a case? The same reasoning applies to the matter of handwriting with added force, because the chance of two signatures being exactly alike is incomparably less than the chance of the supposed throws of the dice.