1858 - Sir William Herschel, British Administrator in District in India, requires fingerprint and

signatures on civil contracts

1880 - Dr. Henry Faulds, a British surgeon and Superintendent of Tsukiji Hospital in Tokyo, published an article in
the Scientific Journal, "Nautre" (nature). He discussed fingerprints as a means of personal identification, and the use
of printers ink as a method for obtaining such fingerprints.
1882 - Gilbert Thompson, employed by the U.S. Geological Survey in New Mexico, uses his own fingerprints on a
document to guard against forgery. This event is the first known use of fingerprints for identification in America.
1883 - Life on the Mississippi, a novel by Mark Twain, tells the story of a murderer who is identified by the use of
fingerprints. His later book "Pudd'n Head Wilson includes a courtroom drama involving fingerprint identification.
1891 - Juan Vucetich, Argentine Police Official, Initiated the fingerprinting of criminals,
(First case used was the Rojas Homicide in 1892)
1882 - Alphonse Bertillion, French anthropologist, devised method of
body measurements to produce a formula used to classify individuals.

Bertillion's formula involved taking the measurements of a persons
body parts, and recording these measurements on a card. This
method of classifying and identifying people became known as the
Bertillion System.
1901 - Sir Edward Henry, an Inspector General of Police in Bengal, India, develops the first
system of classifying fingerprints. This system of classifying fingerprints was first adopted
as the official system in England, and eventually spread throughout the world.
In 1686, Marcello Malpighi, an anatomy professor at the University of Bologna, noted fingerprint ridges, spirals and
loops in his treatise. A layer of skin was named after him; "Malpighi" layer, which is approximately 1.8mm thick.

No mention of friction ridge skin uniqueness or permanence was made by Grew, Bidloo or Malpighi.
1823 - Purkinje
In 1823, John Evangelist Purkinje, anatomy professor at the University of Breslau, published his thesis
discussing nine fingerprint patterns, but he too made no mention of the value of fingerprints for personal
identification.
1863 - Coulier
Professor Paul-Jean Coulier, of Val-de-Grce in Paris, published his observations that (latent) fingerprints can be
developed on paper by iodine fuming, explaining how to preserve (fix) such developed impressions and mentioning
the potential for identifying suspects' fingerprints by use of a magnifying glass.
1888 - Galton
Sir Francis Galton, British anthropologist and a cousin of Charles Darwin, began his observations of fingerprints as
a means of identification in the 1880's.
1918
Edmond Locard wrote that if 12 points (Galton's Details) were the same between two fingerprints, it would suffice
as a positive identification. Locard's 12 points seems to have been based on an unscientific "improvement" over the
eleven anthropometric measurements (arm length, height, etc.) used to "identify" criminals before the adoption of
fingerprints.
1823 - A thesis is published by Johannes Evengelista Purkinje, professor of anatomy with the University of Breslau,
Prussia. The thesis details a full nine different fingerprint patterns. Still, like Malpighi, no mention is made of
fingerprints as an individual identification method.
the German anatomist Georg von Meissner (18291905) studied friction ridges, and five years after this
In 1863, Paul-Jean Coulier (18241890), professor for chemistry and hygiene at the medical and pharmaceutical
school of the Val de Grce military hospital in Paris, discovered that iodine fumes can reveal fingerprints on paper.
The British detective writer R. Austin Freeman's first Thorndyke novel The Red Thumb-Mark was published in 1907
and features a bloody fingerprint left on a piece of paper together with a parcel of diamonds inside a safe-box.