 | |
| Born | 9 January 1833 Slough |
| Died | 24 October 1917 | Age 84 |
Forensic Fingerprints
Contents Forensic Fingerprints Sir William James Herschel 1858 Henry Faulds in Japan Dactyloscopy in the Raj
Sir William James Herschel 1858
Herschel (1833-1917) was one of the first to advocate the use of fingerprinting in the identification of criminal suspects. While working for the Indian Civil Service, he began to use thumbprints on documents as a security measure to prevent the repudiation of signatures in 1858.
Henry Faulds in Japan
In 1880, Dr. Henry Faulds, a Scottish surgeon in a Tokyo hospital, published his first paper on the usefulness of fingerprints for identification and proposed a method to record them with printing ink. He established their first classification. In 1886, he offered the concept to the Metropolitan Police in London, but it was dismissed at that time.
Faulds wrote to Charles Darwin with his method but, too old and ill to work on it, Darwin gave the information to his cousin, Francis Galton. Galton published a detailed statistical model of fingerprint analysis and identification and encouraged its use in forensic science in his book Finger Prints.
