The History of Fingerprinting

Fingerprints have been used and studied in many ways throughout history, although the use has stayed much the same. For example, in ancient Babylon, fingerprints were pressed onto clay tablets in order to deal a deal. Fingerprints have also been found on seals from the Persian Empire.

In 1686, a scientist named Marcello Malpighi discovered ridges, loops, and whorls on fingerprints but did not mention their potential for identification. In 1823 a professor of anatomy (the first to look at fingerprints under s microscope) wrote a thesis containing 9 different types of fingerprints. Still, no mention of identification potential was made.

Around 1858, Sir William Herschel began placing his handprint on the back of contracts, believing that this made it more binding than just a signature. After a while, he bagan requiring palprints, and then just fingerorints. Eventually he noticed that no two fingerprints were the same in his collection. In the 1870s, Dr. Henry Faulds began to study "skin furrows," and passed his thesis on their potential for identifying masses of people to Charles Darwin.

Juan Vucetich, an Argentinian police officer, began the first fingerprinting files (based off the Galton fingerprint patterns) in 1891. The first chemical fingerprint identification was made by him in 1892, on a bloody fingerprint found in a doorframe.

In 1905, the Usited States army began using fingerprints as a mean of personal identification. In 1918, Edward Locard decided and wrote that if two fingerprints matched with at least 12 points of detail, they were the same.

Before computer databases, most fingerprint files were manually searched and maintained, so it took a long time to identify a match.