History of Fingerprinting

Through history, fingerprints have been used as identification in many different societies. From fingerprints left in clay for business transactions in ancient Babylonian to child identification in China. It was not until the mid 1800s when an Englishman named Sir William Hersche was working in India and in order to reduce crime, he began to record his residences fingerprints whenever they signed business documents.

Example of what the fingerprints might have looked like if they were left in clay



 

In the 1870's, Dr. Henry Faulds began to study “skin-furrows” and in that study, he recognized the importance of fingerprints as a means of indentifying someone. Hegave a detailed report of his findings to Charles Darwin who then forwarded it on to his cousin, Francis Galton who began observing the use of fingerprints as identification in the 1880's and published a book about it in 1892 discussing his observations about fingerprints and how they differ from person to person. The odds of two individuals having the same print were about 1 in 64 billion. 

Dr. Henry Faulds

Francis Galton

 

Fingerprinting finally began to spread worldwide in the 1890's and in 1891, an Argentine police official began criminal fingerprinting. In England and Wales, the use of fingerprints for criminal identification in 1901. The U.S. Army in 1905 started fingerprinting their personal for identification and in 1918; Edmond Locard discovered that if there were 12 similar points on top fingerprints, that they were identical. At the time, fingerprint files had to be processed by hand and trying to find a identical print would take weeks but in the mid 1960's police departments saved their fingerprints on to computers systems that could process 600,000 a second.



12 Points in the Fingerprint