Fingerprints: A History

First of all, why is fingerprinting needed? Well society has always looked for a a means to verify a persons criminal record using marks of identification that cannot be removed. In early civilizations they branded criminals so that they could be recognized for what they were and the past crimes they has commented.

The Romans used tattoos to identify mercenaries since they would often wear different armor then that of a normal Roman soldier. Before the mid 1800's they used to identify criminals visually. Certain police officers with "camera eyes" A.K.A. photographic memory. However this did not solve the person identification problem due to the fact that personal appearances change.

In 1870, Alphonse Bertillon devised a system to measure and record the dimensions of certain bony parts of the body. These measurements were made into a formula in which, theoretically, would apply only to one person and would not change during their adult life. Fingerprinting however would make a come back when the Bertillon system calculated two people to be exactly alike.

1686 - MalpighiIn 1686, Marcello Malpighi, a professor of anatomy at the University of Bologna, noted in his treatise; ridges, spirals and loops in fingerprints. He made no mention of their value as a tool for individual identification.

The English first began using fingerprints in July of 1858, when Sir William James Herschel, Chief Magistrate of the Hooghly district in Jungipoor, India, first used fingerprints on native contracts. On a whim, and without thought toward personal identification, Herschel had Rajyadhar Konai, a local businessman, impress his hand print on a contract.

The idea was merely "... to frighten him out of all thought of repudiating his signature." The native was suitably impressed, and Herschel made a habit of requiring palm prints--and later, simply the prints of the right Index and Middle fingers--on every contract made with the locals. Personal contact with the document, they believed, made the contract more binding than if they simply signed it. Thus, the first wide-scale, modern-day use of fingerprints was predicated, not upon scientific evidence, but upon superstitious beliefs.

As his fingerprint collection grew, however, Herschel began to note that the inked impressions could, indeed, prove or disprove identity. While his experience with fingerprinting was admittedly limited, Sir William Herschel's private conviction that all fingerprints were unique to the individual, as well as permanent throughout that individual's life, inspired him to expand their use.

Fingerprinting Developed over the years and became more of a mean of identification. Juan Vucetich made the first criminal fingerprint identification in 1892. He was able to identify Francis Rojas, a woman who murdered her two sons and cut her own throat in an attempt to place blame on another. Her bloody print was left on a door post, proving her identity as the murderer.
Francis Rojas' Inked Fingerprints

Sir Francis Galton published his book, "Fingerprints", establishing the individuality and permanence of fingerprints. The book included the first classification system for fingerprints.
Galton's primary interest in fingerprints was as an aid in determining heredity and racial background. While he soon discovered that fingerprints offered no firm clues to an individual's intelligence or genetic history, he was able to scientifically prove what Herschel and Faulds already suspected: that fingerprints do not change over the course of an individual's lifetime, and that no two fingerprints are exactly the same. According to his calculations, the odds of two individual fingerprints being the same were 1 in 64 billion. Galton identified the characteristics by which fingerprints can be identified. A few of these same characteristics are still in use today, and are sometimes referred to as Galton Details.