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1750 BCE
First Use Of Fingerprinting
Archaeologists discovered fingerprints pressed into clay tablet contracts dating back to 1792-1750 B.C. in Babylon. In Ancient China inked fingerprints on documents. In Western culture, the earliest record of the study of the patterns on human hands comes from 1684 -
Early record of human patterns
Dr. Nehemiah wrote a paper describing the patterns that he saw on human hands under a microscope, including the presence of ridges. -
Nehemiah worked evolved
Johann Christoph Andreas Mayer followed his work in 1788 by describing that "The arrangements of skin ridges is never duplicated in two people" -
Nine fingerprint patterns
Jan Evangelist Purkyn described nine distinct fingerprints patterns, including loops, spirals, circles, and double whorls. -
Uniqueness in Patterns
Sir William Herschel began collecting fingerprints in 1856 and noted the patterns unique to each person and were not altered by age -
Identifying Criminals
In 1879, Alphonse Bertillon, an assistant clerk at a Police Station in Paris, created a way to identify criminals. The system he used is sometimes called Bertillonage. That was first used in 1833 to find a repeating offender. -
Classification System for Fingerprints
Sir Francis Galton along with Sir E.R. Henery, developed the classification system for fingerprints that is still used to this day in the United States and Europe. -
Improved Fingerprint Collection
Ivan Vucetich improved fingerprint collection by recording measurements on ID cards of people used for crimes, made his own classification methods -
First murder solved
Alphonse Bertillon was credited with solving the first murder using fingerprints. After learning to identify criminals -
Fingerprints altered?
Criminal John Dillinger fooled scientist by pouring acid on his fingerprints, eventually the prints grew back from pineapples but he did confuse people and this is when people learned bout manipulating DNA
