Welcome to You Ask Andy

Stuart Freeman, age 1 , of Midland, Mich., for his question:

 How was fingerprinting discovered?

When you work with fine clay, you are sure to leave fingerprints. And people were working with fine clay before the dawn of history. Perhaps our remote ancestors considered their fingerprints a nuisance. For if the networks of lines were not smoothed out they showed on the dried clay. Early man certainly knew about fingerprints. And some early genius discovered how to sign his name with a thumbprint. He must have known that his print was different from everyone else’s.

We do not know how or when this discovery was made. But it may well have been before the dawn of history ‑ before men learned to write. At any rate, the thumbprint was a custom in the ancient east. It was used by kings to sign royal documents. These people must have known that, though a signature can be copied, a thumbprint cannot.

Our exact science of fingerprinting is a long way from this first simple step. It took years of work and study to prove that no two people have identical fingerprints. It took a lot of crusading to get fingerprinting adopted as a method of crime detection. In the past few years, fingerprinting has added the role of identifying missing persons. This last is the reason why sensible people like to have their fingerprints on record with the F.B.I.

The first serious study of fingerprints was done in 1823. J.E. Purkinje, a professor of physiology, read a paper to the University of Breslau. He suggested that fingerprints could be classified under nine types. The general public was not impressed. But the idea was developed by a few men, until it was finally accepted as a method of crime detection.

The early field work was done in India. Sir E. R. Henry was an alert administrator in Bengal. He used fingerprinting in crime detection and persuaded the Bengal police to work with him. Later in his career, the alert Sir Henry became chief commissioner of the London police. He worked out a classification of fingerprints which is the bates for our modern system. The scientific system.

The scientific theory of fingerprints was worked out by a famous cousin of the great Charles Darwin. He was Sir Francis Galton, anthropologist and meteorologist. Sir Francis took time from his studies of men and the weather to prepare two papers on fingerprints. His scientific studies together with endless field work, proved beyond doubt that everyone in the world has his own personal set of fingerprints.

Fingerprints are coded under four basic types ‑ the arch, the loop, the whorl and the composite. There are a number of sub‑divisions of each type. A loop, for instance, may be a plain loop, a central pocket loop or a double loop. The design is composed of a number of fine lines, and the number of lines in each design helps to identify the print.

The job of sorting fingerprints from the files is done by a machine. Out pops a card with a series of numbers or numbers and symbols. There is not one chance in a billion that you have one fingerprint exactly like somebody else’s.

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