History of Fingeprinting

Fingerprinting has been around for more than 3,000 years. The first documented fingerprints date back to ancient Babylon. There, fingerprints were used for business transactions. Fingerprints were also used on clay seals in China as well in Persia by different government officials.

        

    The development of fingerprinting to what it is today started in the late 1700’s when Marcello Malpighi, a professor at the University of Bologna observed a difference of spirals, ridges and loops in fingerprints. However, Malpighi did not acknowledge fingerprinting as a means of identification. One of the first discoveries of fingerprints being used as a means of identification was by Paul-Jean Coulier in 1863. Coulier explained that latent fingerprints could be developed on paper by using iodine fuming which may preserve developed impressions. Using iodine fuming gives an investigator the chance to identify a suspect’s by using a magnifying glass.

                                                            

Marcello Malpighi

  The first criminal fingerprint was made in 1892 by Juan Vucetich. He used fingerprinting as a means to identify a murderer by the name of Francis Rojas, who murdered her two sons and then proceeded to cut her own throat in order to make it look like someone else did it. However, her bloody fingerprint was found on the door which proved her as the murderer.

Five years later in 1897 Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose will become the two Indian fingerprint experts that develop the Henry System, a system used to identify fingerprints, named for their supervisor, Edward Richard Henry.



Edward Richard Henry

            In 1903 The New York State Prison system began using fingerprints in the U.S. for criminals. In 1905, 1907 and 1908 the Army, Navy and Marines adopt fingerprints, respectively.

        

    In 1908 Edmond Locard identified that if 12 points (Galton's Details) were the same between two fingerprints, the two fingerprints would be identical.

                                                          

Edmond Locard

In 1924, an act of U.S. Congress created the Identification Division of the FBI. The IACP's National Bureau of Criminal Identification and the US Justice Department's Bureau of Criminal Identification merged to form the nucleus of the FBI fingerprint files. By 1946, the FBI had processed 100 million fingerprint cards in manually maintained files; and by 1971, 200 million cards. With the introduction of automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS) technology, the files were split into computerized criminal files.