Fingerprints

Looking back people have always used the fact that fingerprints are different to an advantage. In ancient Babylon fingerprints were used on clay tablets for business transactions and in China fingerprints have been found on clay seals.

People started to realised that no two prints were alike in 14th century Persia when a doctor looked at some official government papers with fingerprint impressions on and realised that none of them where the same.

Marcello Malpighi discovered the different ridges, loops and spirals on fingerprints in 1686 but did not investigate further.

John Evangelist Purkinji named 9 different fingerprint types at University of Breslau in 1823.

Sir William Hershel was the chief magistrate Hooghly district in Jungipoor, India and was sending a letter and he started to print his hand on the back of the paper. The native he had sent it to was impressed and sent his own print back. Sir William made a habit of sending these prints and soon he had a collection. As his collection grew he realised (on close and long examination) that none of the prints were exactly alike.

Dr. Henry Faulds was studying skin furrows and after he noticed some fingerprints on pre-historic pottery he studied further and realised the importance of prints as means of identification. He tried to get Sir Charles Darwin to help with his investigation but he was beginning to grow old and weak but promised to pass them on to his cousin Francis Galton.

Gilbert Thompson was the first known person in the US to use fingerprints. He used them to prevent forgery of his documents.

Mark Twain wrote a book called Life on the Mississippi and in this book the murderer was caught because of fingerprint identification. This sparked the idea of the police using fingerprint identification.

Sir Francis Galton started research on fingerprints in 1880 and published a book in 1882. This book was cleverly named 'Fingerprints' and included the first classification for fingerprints. He soon learned lots of facts as his interest for fingerprints increased. Some of his most famous discoveries where:

-fingerprints have no clues of peoples intelligence of genetic history

-they do not change during ones life time

-no two fingerprints are like same

-there is a 1 in 64billion chance that two fingerprints are the same

Juan Vucetich made the first criminal fingerprint identification.

In 1901 England and Wales started using fingerprints in all of their investigations.

In 1902 systematic fingerprinting started in U.S.

In 1903 The New York State Prison started collecting a bank of fingerprints of their prisoners

In 1905 the U.S. army started using fingerprints.

In 1918 Edmond Locard realised that if 12 points where the same in a fingerprint they were the same.

In 1999 the F.B.I planned to stop using paper fingerprints after recently losing all of their papers with them on.

Now fingerprints can be stored on the computer.