A History of Fingerprints
INTERPOL
Antonio Farelo
See also the instructional videos on "Fingerprint Classification and Comparison"
Timeline
3000 BC- Petroglyphs (stone drawings) the Mic-Mac indians depicting a hand with exaggerated fingerprints– showing whorls and loops.
- Clay seals were commonly used among officials during the Han Dynasty in China.
- A law book of Yung-Hwui described the use of fingerprints to officially sign divorce matters between a man and a woman.
- A crime novel by Shi-naingan, entitled The Story of the River Bank, refers to the use of fingerprints related to a murder trial.
- The first scientific recognition of fingerprints in the West. The English plant morphologist Dr. Nehemiah Grew, studied and described the ridges, furrows and pores of both the human hands and feet. His report was issued to London's Royal Society.
- A professor of anatomy and plant morphologist at the University of Bologna Italy, Marcello Malpighi, referred to the varying ridges and patterns of human fingerprints.
- Prussian/Czech/Bohemian professor of anatomy and physiology Johannes Evangelista Purkinje of Breslau University was the first person to create a system of classifying fingerprints. In his thesis published in December 1823, he described and illustrated nine fingerprint pattern types in considerable detail.
- The first recorded systematic capture of hand and finger images that were uniformly taken for identification purposes was implemented in 1858 by Sir William Hershel, while working for the Civil Service of India as the chief administrator of the Hooghly District of Bengal.
- Scottish physician and surgeon Dr Henry Faulds proposes that fingerprint images could be used to solve crimes. This moved fingerprint images beyond civil applications such as contracts, and into the forensic arena.
- A new identification method based on the physical measurements of the human body (Bertillonage) devised by Frenchman Alphonse Bertillon is approved in France and later in other european countries.
- English anthropologist Sir Francis Galton (Charles Darwin's cousin) published a book on the use of fingerprints for identification, Finger Prints, crea8ng the basis for the fingerprints classification.
- The first recorded case in which fingerprints were used to solve a crime took place in Argentina.
- The Argentinean police had abandoned ‘Bertillonage’ in favour of fingerprints in criminal records based on a classification system for fingerprints created by the Argentinean Juan Vucetich. His classification system was used throughout South America.
- Sir Edward Henry, a Commissioner of Police in India, develops a classification method for fingerprints that gradually replaces the anthropometrical records of bertillonage. The Henry Classification System becomes the international standard for fingerprint classification and remains the with this role until the introduction of AFIS.
- Fingerprint technicians were so numerous that the International Association for Identification was created.
- Frenchman Edmond Locard, qualified in both medicine and law and also a student of Bertillon, established the first rules for the minimum number of ridges that must concur before a fingerprint match might be declared.
- The US Congress funded and created, at the then Bureau of Investigation (now known as the FBI), the Identification Division responsible for a central repository of fingerprint files.
- After the assassination of US President, John F. Kennedy, and during examination by the Dallas Police crime lab, the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle which had been found on the 6th floor of the Texas Book Depository, revealed a latent partial palm print belonging to Lee Harvey Oswald.
- Latent fingerprints on a rifle led to the arrest of James Earl Ray for the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
- The Royal Canadian Mounted Police began operation of the first AFIS system. Meanwhile, San Francisco also claimed to have the first AFIS when its AFIS only became operational in 1984.
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