The
earliest dated prints of the ridged skin on human hands and feet
were made about 4,000 years ago during the pyramid building era
in Egypt. In addition, one small portion of palm print, not known
to be human, has been found impressed in hardened mud at a 10,000-year
old site in Egypt. In ancient Babylon, fingerprints on clay tablets
were used for business transactions; in fourteenth-century Persia,
many government papers had fingerprints on them; and in Nova Scotia,
a prehistoric picture shows a hand with ridge patterns.
It
was common practice for the Chinese to use inked fingerprints
on official documents, land sales, contracts, loans and acknowledgments
of debts. The oldest existing documents so endorsed date from
the 3rd century BC, and it was still an effective practice until
recent times. Even though it is recorded that the Chinese used
their fingerprints to establish identity in courts in litigation
over disputed business dealings, researchers fail to agree as
to whether the Chinese were fully aware of the uniqueness of a
fingerprint or whether the physical contact with documents had
some spiritual significance.
Both Nehemiah Grew, M.D. with his 1684 report for the Royal Society
of London, and the anatomist Govard Bidloo from Holland in his
book on human anatomy in 1685, discussed and illustrated their
recognition of the friction ridges and the pores within those
ridges. A small number of other academics from various European
countries also made anatomical studies of the skin. In 1686 a
professor of anatomy, Marcello Malpighi, described the ridges,
loops, and spirals of fingerprints. J.C.A. Mayer, in his 1788
book Anatomische Kupfertafeln Nebst Dazu Gehorigen, was
the first to state that the “arrangement of skin ridges is
never duplicated in two persons." In 1823, another anatomy
professor, John Evangelist Purkinje, was the first to describe
nine basic fingerprint patterns.
It
was not until 1858 that the first practical application of the
science was made, when an English administrator in India, Sir
William Herschel, commenced placing the inked palm impressions
and, later, thumb impressions of some members of the local population
on contracts. These prints were used as a form of signature on
the documents because of the high level of illiteracy in India
and frequent attempts at forgery. Herschel also began fingerprinting
all prisoners in jail.
The
greatest advances in fingerprint science in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries were probably made by Dr. Henry Faulds, a
Scottish missionary doctor of the United Presbyterian Church.
Faulds first became interested in fingerprints after 1874 while
working at the hospital he established in Tsukiji, Tokyo, Japan.
After careful experiment and observation, he became convinced
that fingerprint patterns did not change, that the fingerprint
patterns on the fingers where highly variable and that superficial
injury did not alter them, they returned to their former design
as the injury healed.
Faulds
described
the pattern formations on the fingers, referred to "loops"
and "whorls"
and stating how good sets of fingerprints may be obtained by the
use of "a common slate
or smooth board of any kind, or a sheet of tin, spread over very
thinly with printer's ink.
His most important conclusion was that fingerprints do not change
and that finger
marks (that is, latent prints) left on objects by bloody or greasy
fingers "may
lead to the scientific identification of criminals".
CURIOUS
FOOTNOTE: Prior to using fingerprints to identify individuals,
a system of measuring bony parts of the body was used. This system
was devised in the late 1800s by Alphonse Bertillon, a French
anthropologist. Bertillon measured certain bony body parts and
then used a formula to come up with a value that would apply to
only one person in the world and would not change during that
person's lifetime. This technique, named the Bertillon System
after its inventor, was accepted as valid for 30 years. In 1903,
a bizarre event triggered the end of the Bertillon system. A man
by the name of Will West was sent to the federal penitentiary
in Leavenworth, Kansas. The problem was that the penitentiary
already had an inmate named William West. When photographs of
the two men were compared, they were identical. When the authorities
used Bertillon measurements, they indicated that both men were
the same person. Finally, their fingerprints were compared, proving
they were indeed two different individuals. When authorities reviewed
prison records and correspondence from the men's families, they
discovered that Will West and William West were identical twins.
In that same year, the New York state prison system began using
fingerprints to identify criminals, and a year later fingerprint
identification was started at the Leavenworth penitentiary. Thanks
to the West brothers, today we only have to put an inked thumbprint
on a piece of paper,
rather than have all of our bony body parts measured.
