Important Contributions to Forensic Science

By Charl26
  • 1200

    First ever case of the use of Forensic Science in 13th century China

    When someone was stabbed in a village the people collected all of the knives and used flies to detect which knife was used to kill the villager.
  • Mathieu Orfila the father of Forensic Toxicology

    Mathieu was a Spanish chemist and he used his talents as a chemist to make chemical analysis a part of the forensic field at the time. He was the first person to analyze blood and semen under a microscope. He also studied asphyxiation, exhumation, and decomposition of human bodies.
  • William Herschel and Thumbprints

    In Jungipoor, India Englishman William Herschel made the citizens of the area put their thumbprint on documents when signing them to reduce the amount of fraud in the area.
  • Alphonse Bertillon The Father of Criminal Identification

    Alphonse Bertillon Came up with the first physical method of identifying criminals with measurements and photographs.
  • Henry Faulds

    Henry Faulds was a Scottish doctor who used fingerprints to protect the innocence.
  • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

    Wrote the first "Sherlock Holmes" story that popularized the forensic science fields. There were 4 novels and 56 short stories in the Sherlock Holmes series.
  • Francis Galton

    Francis Galton studied fingerprints and proved that they are unique. He classified fingerprints too.
  • Hans Gross

    Wrote a book that described how to apply forensics to criminal investigation.
  • Karl Landsteiner

    Karl Landsteiner was an Austrian biologist, physician, and immunologist who discovered the A, B, and O blood groups and he would later receive the Nobel Prize for the discovery.
  • Edmond Locard

    Incorporated Hans Gross' principles in his book he published in a crime lab. He later became the founder and director of the Institute of Criminalistics at the University of Lyons, France.
  • Albert S. Osborn

    Albert Osborn wrote a book "Questionable Documents" which led to fundamental document examination and his book was later revised in 1929 for a second edition.
  • leone Lattes

    Leone Lattes was an Italian scientist who developed a way to discover blood type from dried blood.
  • August Vollmer

    August Vollmer established the first crime lab in the US because he saw the need for a reliable way to analyze crime scene clues.
  • Calvin Goddard

    Calvin Godard was a forensic scientist, army officer, academic, researcher and a pioneer in forensic ballistics.He came up with the comparison microscope and he used it in the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre and discovered it was the Mob who did it not the police.