The policeman lost all hope when they found the empty wooden frame. Until that moment, they

still believed that perhaps this was all a misunderstanding, that perhaps she had simply been

misplaced. But the empty frame, discovered in a stairwell at the Louvre, dashed that hope.

The Mona Lisa had indeed been stolen.

It was a stifling hot day in August 1911. The head of the Paris police force, Louis Lapine,

nodded grimly at the empty frame. Then he ordered someone to summon his top detective,

the man that Sherlock Holmes, in a story, once called the greatest

detective in Europe, Alphonse Bertione. Between them, Lapine and Bertione were the top

crime-fighting duo in the world for a simple reason. They harnessed the power of science.

They used forensics and psychology, transforming detective work by focusing

on evidence and eliminating blind spots. But if anything, the Mona Lisa case exposed their own

blind spots, and the science that made them so famous, so formidable, would humiliate them in the

end.

This is The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Keen, a topsy, turvy, sciencey history podcast, where footnotes become the real story.

Louis Lapine was short and slight with a trim white beard.

He often wore a bowler hat atop his bald head.

Lapine transformed police work by introducing a new dimension, forensics.

No longer would detectives just follow hunches.

They had to hunt for clues and analyze crime scenes, preferably using science.

Philippine also introduced psychological profiling.

You had to think like a criminal, get inside their minds.

And because each crime was unique, so was each psychological profile. Le Penh took the fictional idea of Sherlock Holmes style detection and made it a reality. Perhaps most famously,

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