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Fingerprinting Characteristics
Marcell Malpighi, anatomy professor at the University of Bologna in Italy, begins to note the characteristics of fingerprints by ridges, loops, and ridges with the help of the newly invented microscope. -
Works of Art
Thomas Bewick, an English engraver, author and naturalist, used engravings of his own fingerprints to identify his works. Thomas Bewick was one of the first people to see the individuality of a fingerprint. -
Thesis of Characteristics
Johannes Evengelista Purkinje, a professor of anatomy at the University of Breslau, Prussia, published a thesis detailing that there are nine different fingerprint patterns. No identification method is mentioned. -
Military Fingerprinting
William Herschel was responsible for the payment/allowances to Indian soldiers and had a rough time preventing impersonation. He started taking fingerprints from each soldier as he was paid and found he could tell apart the genuine prints from the fake, which immediately stopped any impersonation attempts. -
Personal Identification
Henry Faulds had begun his study of what he called “skin-furrows” during the 1870s after looking at fingerprints on old clay pottery. He is also credited with the first fingerprint identification: a greasy print left by a laboratory worker on a bottle of alcohol. -
First Fingerprint Identification in America
Gilbert Thompson, employed by the U.S. Geological Survey in New Mexico, uses his own fingerprints on a document to guard against fraud. This is considered one of the first events where fingerprints were used for personal identification. -
Mark Twain
Mark Twain wrote a book of a murder where fingerprints are used to indentify the murderer. -
Sir Francis Galton
Sir Francis Galton’s began his study of fingerprints during the 1880s, mainly to come up with a tool for determining genetic history and hereditary traits -
Juan Vucetich
Juan Vucetich, an Argentine police official, had recently started keeping the first fingerprint files based on Galton’s work. First criminal fingerprint taken and documented. -
Murders in Argentina
Police use a bloody fingerprint to solve a murder in Argentina, also that year they began to file fingerprints. -
Henry Fingerprint Classification System
Back in England and Wales, the success of the “Henry Fingerprint Classification System” in India was creating a stir, and a committee was formed to review Scotland Yard's identification methods. Henry was then transferred to England, where he began training investigators to use the Henry Classification System after founding Scotland Yard's Central Fingerprint Bureau. Within a few years, the Henry Classification System was in use around the world, and fingerprints had been established as the uni -
Paris
Paris police began keeping fingerprints of criminals on file. After a murder was committed, police found a fingerprint at the scene and compared it against their files; they were able to identify the killer. -
Fingerprinting in Prisons
In 1903, the New York state prisons adopted the use of fingerprints for inmates. -
Marines hop on the Bandwagon
The U.S. Army gets on the fingerprinting bandwagon, and within three years was joined by the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. In the ensuing 25 years, as more law enforcement agencies joined in using fingerprints as personal identification methods, these agencies began sending copies of the fingerprint cards to the recently established National Bureau of Criminal Investigation. -
Fingerprint Storage
The first central storage location for fingerprints in North America is established in Ottawa by Edward Foster of the Dominion Police Force. It is taken care of by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and it originally held only 2000 sets of fingerprints, today there over 2 million. -
F.B.I Fingerprint Cards
The U.S. Congress acts to establish the Identification Division of the F.B.I. The National Bureau and Leavenworth are consolidated to form the basis of the F.B.I. fingerprint repository. By 1946, the F.B.I. had processed 100 million fingerprint cards; that number doubles by 1971. -
Automatic Fingerprint Recognition
Research and Development program began to produce an AFR System which would automatically scan fingerprints, recognise the relationships of ridge characteristics and store them for searching purposes. -
Latent Fingerprinting
In 1976, Fuseo Matsumur, a trace evidence examiner at the Saga Prefectural Crime Laboratory of the National Police Agency of Japan. Matsumur informed his co-worker Masato Soba, a latent print examiner, of this. Matsumur informed his coworker Soba who became the first person to develop latent fingerprints, fingerprints left at a crime scene that are difficult to see, by "Superglue" fuming. -
Genetic Fingerprinting
Genetic Fingerprinting, developed by Professor Alec Jeffries at the University of Leicester in 1984, was a huge step in the battle against crime. It could accurately identify one human from another with the exception of identical siblings. -
AFIS
AFIS, or Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems, begin widespread use around the country. This computerized system of storing and cross-referencing criminal fingerprint records would eventually become capable of searching millions of fingerprint files in minutes, revolutionizing law enforcement efforts. -
National DNA Library
Sophisticated new methods are being developed using DNA technology. One technique can already identify the color of a suspect’s hair, and in the future skin, colour and facial characteristics. -
Missing Children
As Americans become more concerned with the growing missing and abducted children problem, and law enforcement groups urge the fingerprinting of children for investigative purposes in the event of a child becoming missing, Chris Migliaro founds Fingerprint America in Albany, NY. -
South Wales Case Solved
Genetic Fingerprinting successfully resolved four high-profile legacy murders in the South Wales Police Force area – Geraldine Palk of Cardiff and Pauline Floyd, Geraldine Hughes and Sandra Newton of Llandarcy.
