History of Forensic Science Timeline

By cnido
  • 44 BCE

    Assassination of Julius Cesar

    Doctor performed an autopsy on Cesar, confirming his death by one fatal wound out of 23.
  • 400

    Law made - Cause of Death

    A law was made by Germanic and Slavic societies which stated that in crimes, medical experts must be the ones to determine the cause of death.
  • 600

    Fingerprints

    This marks when fingerprints were first used for identification. It was used by Arabic merchants.
  • 1248

    1st Forensic Science Book

    The Chinese published the first ever forensic science manual.

  • Reporting Cases

    Publishing of the first pathology reports.

  • Physical Evidence

    First recorded case of the physical match of evidence lead to the murder conviction of John Toms in England. The evidence was a torn edge of a newspaper in a pistol that matched the newspaper found in his pocket.

  • Poisoning

    Valentin Ross, a German chemist developed a method to detect arsenic in a victim's stomach.

  • More Physical Evidence

    Forensic work heightens. The clothing and shoes of a farm laborer were examined and found to match the evidence of a nearby murder scene where a young woman drowned in a shallow pool.

  • Chemical Testing

    An English chemist named James Marsh used chemical processes to determine arsenic as the cause of death in a murder trial.

  • Photos

    Between 1854-1859, San Francisco became the first city in the U.S. to use photography for criminal identification.

  • Fingerprints

    Henry Faulds and William James Herschel publish a paper about fingerprints. A scientist named Francis Galton adapted their findings in court. Findings included: plain arch, tented arch and lateral pocket loop, among others.

  • Fingerprint ID

    Juan Vucetich, an Argentinian police officer is the first ever to use fingerprints as evidence in a murder investigation. He termed it dactyloscopy.

  • Blood Markers

    Karl Landsteiner discovers the human blood grouping, ABO and it is adapted for use on bloodstains by Dieter Max Richter.

  • Fingerprint ID

    The Galton Henry system of fingerprint identification becomes the most widely used fingerprinting method to date.

  • Fingerprint Prisoner

    The New York state prison system implements fingerprint identification.

  • Forensic Learning

    The first school of forensic science is founded by Rodolphe Archibald Reiss in Switzerland.

  • Hair

    The first study on hair is published by Victor Balthazard and Marcelle Lambert. Microscopic studies done on most animals and the first legal case ever involving hair took place.

  • Guns

    Victor Balthazard developed several methods of matching bullets to guns by photography due to realizing that tools used to make gun barrels never leave the same markings, and individual gun barrels leave identifying grooves on each bullet fired through it.

  • Crime Labs

    In Los Angeles the first police crime lab is established.

  • Lie Detection

    John Larson invented the prototype polygraph in 1921 to be used in police stations.

  • Lab

    FBI establishes its very own crime lab, one of the foremost in the world.

  • Voice Recording

    The discovery of a sound spectrograph was made, with the ability to record voices. Voiceprints began to be used in investigations as phone evidence. These came from phones, answering machines or tape recorders.