History of fingerprints in forensic science
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1858 - Sir William Herschel, British Administrator in District in India, requires fingerprint and signatures on civil contracts
Fingerprints have been used as a means of positively identifying people for many years. Here is a brief history of the
science of fingerprints:
1892 - Sir Francis Galton, a British Anthropologist and cousin to Charles Darwin, publishes the first book on fingerprints.
In his book, Galton identifies the individuality and uniqueness of fingerprints. The unique characteristics of fingerprints, as
identified by Galton, will officially become known as minutiae, however they are sometimes still referred to as Galton’s
Details.
1896 - International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), Establish National Bureau of Criminal Identification, for the
exchange of arrest information
1901 - Sir Edward Henry, an Inspector General of Police in Bengal, India, develops the first system of classifying
fingerprints. This system of classifying fingerprints
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Biographies
Vucetich's personal identification card (libreta de enrolamiento), 1911
Fingerprinting was used not only to identify criminal suspects and convicts. It was also employed as a method of government control. After Vucetich perfected his system, Argentinean citizens were issued an identification book with a fingerprint stamp that functioned as an internal passport.
Dirección Museo Policial–Ministerio de Seguridad de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina
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Juan Vucetich (1858–1925)
Juan Vucetich (1858–1925), an Argentinian police official, devised the first workable system of fingerprint identification, and pioneered the first use of fingerprint evidence in a murder investigation. As a young man, Vucetich emigrated from Croatia to Argentina, where he took a job in the La Plata Police Office of Identification and Statistics. After reading an article in a French journal on Francis Galton's experiments with fingerprints as a means of identification, Vucetich began collecting fingerprints, taken from arrested men, while a
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A History of Fingerprinting
It took about a century to create a viable identification system which could deal with masses of information efficiently. For years the ability to identify people through their fingerprints remained simply a dream. Thanks though to the work of many pioneers, including Sir William Herschel, Henry Faulds, Francis Galton, Juan Vucetich and Sir Edward Henry, this dream eventually became a reality.
Human knowledge of fingerprints is not new. In Asia, Europe and North America there are cave paintings which feature fingerprints, possibly showing authorship and/or identity. In China there is evidence of fingerprint impressions made in clay which were then used for official documents. While the archaeological material can be dated to the 7th Century, additional evidence suggests that this practice occurred as early as the period of the Han Dynasty (220 BC – 202 BC- so to put this in context, Rome was not even an empire at this period.) In the medieval period, some wax seals from the Holy Roman Empire bore deep fingerprints, usually three in a line.
Prior t
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