The History and Development of Fingerprint Classification

The History and Development of Fingerprint Classification

Harold Waller

St. Leo University

Fingerprinting has come a long way since it has been used especially based on the technology that we have to this very day. It is hard to believe that such techniques now are revamped ways to identify people more accurately. There is a lot that a fingerprint tells, because fingerprints no matter if they are from twins are always different. There are never two identical matches for fingerprints, and this is why this system is so reliable that it is used every day to help investigations, and other means of identification. As it was mentioned before, before we can look at today's techniques of fingerprinting we must look back and trace it to the start.

Back in ancient times the Babylonians seemed to harness this system of identification and they had a very basic yet useful system. The Babylonians would press the tips of their fingers into clay, but it was mainly used for business like a signature, and a means of identification during transactions. The Chinese used the more recent method of putting ink of their fingers and pressing them on paper as a means of fingerprinting, but it was for business as well as identifying their own children. However though, fingerprinting was not used on criminal identification until 1858, and it was by an Englishman named Sir William Herschel. He was not using it on criminals in England though, he was actually working in the district of Hooghly in Jungipoor, India. Herschel used this method as a mean to prevent fraudulence as fingerprinted residence whenever they signed any documents that were business related. From here on out the use of fingerprinting became more for identification purposes and rose in its frequency of usage.

The start of a classification system began with a Scottish doctor named Henry Faulds. Faulds was working in Japan and when he saw the fingerprints that artists had left on some clay, he had an idea to learn how to use fingerprints. Around the time of 1880, Faulds sent a letter to Charles Darwin whom was his cousin, and he sent the letter to Sir Francis Galton. This letter was the spark for a system, because in this letter Faulds asked if he could have help developing a fingerprint classification system. Galton was known as a eugenicist and a eugenicist is known as a person who collects measurements on people from all over the world in order to find out how traits are inherited from generation to generation. So he collected up to 8,000 different samples of fingerprints, and not long after published a book "Fingerprints," and in that book he talked of a fingerprint classification system. This was the first system in the world, and the classification was based off of the patterns such as the whorls, loops, and arches found on the fingertips.

Around the same time the French law enforcement was creating their own system to identify criminals. In their system they tried to identify them by using anthropometry or measurements of certain body parts in the crime, and other physical characteristics, and this was developed by Alphonse Bertillon. In another part of the world around the same time a police officer in Buenos Aires, Argentina named Juan Vucetich was creating another fingerprinting system. He began creating it around 1892 when he was investigating a murder involving two boys and the suspects were the boy's mother or the boyfriend of the mother. After measurements were performed on the fingerprints the killer had in fact been the mother and she confessed to the crime, and thus the first successful use of fingerprinting was used in criminal identification. Later Vucetich called his system of identification comparative dactyloscopy.

Around 1896, Sir Edward Henry began using fingerprinting to find criminals, and he began to study them. He added on to Galton's technique, and made his own system that was based on the direction of the markings, the pattern, flow of markings, and the friction ridges. His system seemed to become a more specific version of Galton's initial classification system. In fact, Henry's system involved equations along with the characteristics that could separate one person's fingerprint from another. So the use of anthropometry began to fall and was replaced by the Henry Classification System, and it took hold as a primary method throughout the world. It was not long until fingerprint