Tony Elia, age 13, of Niagara Falls, Ont., Canada, for his question:
DO BOTH HANDS HAVE THE SAME FINGERPRINTS?
Fingerprints seem to go hand in hand with murder mysteries and whodunit movies. When the use of fingerprints began, however, it was only as a means of identification. Potters, artists, merchants and perhaps even kings used a thumb print as an indisputable signature.
A fingerprint is the impression of the inside of the finger between the tip and the first joint. If you look at your fingertips you can see the tiny ridges that loop, twist and turn every which way. Glands beneath the surface of our skin secrete an oil to keep our skin soft. When you press your fingers against a solid surface, the oil is left behind in the patterns formed by your fingerprints.
Sir William Herschel is given credit for being the first to devise a workable method of fingerprint identification. In the 1850s he was a British government official in Bengal, India.
He sought to use the thumb prints of illiterate workers as a means of positive identification. In those days people often pretended to be someone else so they could collect wages they hadn't earned.
In time, the idea of fingerprinting, more properly called dactylography, developed into a scientific system. Sir Francis Galton founded the present system of fingerprint identification in the early 1900s. His system was later refined and perfected by Sir E.R. Henry, a commissioner of Scotland Yard of London. Today the Henry system is the most commonly used.
Fingerprints can be broken down into three large groups of patterns the arch, the loop and the whorl. Each large group bears the same general characteristics. The loop and arch groups are broken down further into two smaller groups each, while the whorl group is broken down into four smaller groups. This makes eight groups in all, and from here on it really gets complicated.
You can begin to understand how detailed it gets when you realize that out of the billions of people in the world no two share the same fingerprints. What's more, the prints on your right hand are different from those on your left.
Multiply the world population by 10 and you can come pretty close to the total number of different fingerprints that exist.
Besides being useful in catching criminals and other misguided folk, fingerprints are an invaluable aid in identifying amnesia victims, missing persons and unknown deceased persons. Many times the victims of major disasters can be positively identified if their fingerprints are on file.
About three quarters of the American population have their fingerprints on record. This provides a quick and positive means of identification that can be useful to us. Many times a fingerprint has been instrumental in reuniting separated families, locating missing persons and saving innocent people from prison.