Fingerprinting History

Introduction to Fingerprinting History

The first recorded use of fingerprints was by the ancient Assyrians and Chinese for the signing of legal documents. Probably the first modern study of fingerprints was made by the Czech physiologist Johannes Evangelista Purkinje, who in 1823 proposed a system of classification that attracted little attention. The use of fingerprints for identification purposes was proposed late in the 19th century by the British scientist Sir Francis Galton, who wrote a detailed study of fingerprints in which he presented a new classification system using prints of all ten fingers, which is the basis of identification systems still in use. In the 1890s the police in Bengal, India, under the British police official Sir Edward Richard Henry, began using fingerprints to identify criminals. As assistant commissioner of metropolitan police, Henry established the first British fingerprint files in London in 1901. Subsequently, the use of fingerprinting as a means for identifying criminals spread rapidly throughout Europe and the United States, superseding the old Bertillon system of identification by means of body measurements.” (1)

Resources

Notes and References

• Information about Fingerprinting History in the Encarta Online Encyclopedia

Guide to Fingerprinting History

In this Section

Fingerprinting, Fingerprinting History and Fingerprinting Modern Use.