History of Fingerprinting

In 14th century Persia many official government documents had fingerprints, and one official, who was a doctor, noticed that no two fingerprints are identical. In 1870 Aphonse Bertillon, a french anthropologist, developed a system of identification where the dimensions of specific bony parts of the body were measured and recorded. A formula was made by reducing these measurements. According to the theory this formula would apply to only person an would not change in their adult life. This system seemed to be effective, it was difficult to search through all the measurements by hand in order to find a person with one arm that was a centimeter longer than the other. For 30 years this system was used or accepted until two men with almost the same name nearly identical measurements. After this incident the system never really recovered. In 1892 sir Frances Galton published a book establishing the individuality and permanence of fingerprints. He calculated that the chances for 2 people having the same fingerprints were 1 in 64 billion. In his book Galton identifies the characteristics by which fingerprints can be identified as. These characteristics are still used and are known as Galton details.

In 1892 an Argentinian police officer by the name of Juan Vucetich made the first fingerprinting investigation using the Galton details and the Bertillon system. In 1901 Galton's observations were revised by Sir Edward Richard Henry making it the Henry classification system. In 1903 the U.S began the systematic use of fingerprints for criminals which began in The New York State prison. Later in 1905 the US Army saw the use if fingerprints. Nearly two year later the US Navy starting using them and a year afterwards the Marine Corp followed in their footsteps. Within the next 25 years even more and more law enforcement agencies would start using fingerprints as a means of personal identification. Congress passed an act in 1924 establishing the identifications system of the F.B.I. BY 1946 the F.B.I had maintained over 100 million fingerprint cards in manually kept files. The F.B.I had planned to stop using fingerprint cards, by 1999, inside the new integrated AFIS. This would initially have 33 million computerized criminal fingerprint records. In 2005 fingerprint card record were still being processed for all identification purposes.