History of Fingerprints By hondacivicboiii83 220 BCE Ancient Chinese use fingerprints Period: 200 BCE to 1400 Prehistoric 1400 Jaamehol-Tawarikh includes comments about identifying persons from fingerprints 1684 Nehemiah Grew documents friction ridge skin observations 1685 Govard Bidloo documents friction ridge skin details 1788 Johann Mayer published drawings of friction ridge skin details 1823 Jan Purkinje publishes thesis detailing nine patterns 1858 The English use fingerprints 1863 Latent prints can be produced by iodine fuming 1877 Hand marks under microscope 1882 Thompson uses his own thumbprint to prevent forgery 1882 Bertillon System 1891 Vucetich uses galton pattern types for fingerprint files 1892 Alvarez and Galton Alvarez makes the first fingerprint identification system. Galton publishes a book establishing the importance of fingerprints in identification. 1901 Fingerprint Branch at Metropolitan Police is formed 1903 New York uses fingerprints for ID 1905 US Army uses fingerpints 1924 FBI Identification Division is formed 2012 Interpol's AFIS exceeds 150,000 sets of unique prints 2020 Department of Homeland Security OBIM contains over 120 million sets of unique prints