Prenatal Form and Function – The Making of an Earth Suit

Fingerprints

Although humans have noticed fingerprints for many centuries (a prehistoric Native American carving depicts a hand complete with fingerprint patterns), they have been routinely used for identification only in the past hundred years. William James Herschel was one of the early pioneers of fingerprinting, or rather hand-printing.

Working in India in 1858, he required illiterate workers to leave a handprint when picking up their paychecks. The prints thus recorded positively identified the worker, since each human's unique whorls and loops never change. For the workers, however, the handprint derived its strength not for scientific reasons, but because they believed that the physical contact of the handprint gave Herschel power over them. In 1892, Sir Francis Galton (cousin to Charles Darwin) wrote the first book on fingerprints. There he stated his belief that fingerprints were ideal for identification, as they were unique and unchanging. Galton set up the basic method of classification still used today. Mark Twain used fingerprints to convict a murderer in a story as early as 1883, but the use of fingerprints in U.S. law enforcement lagged far behind fiction. It wasn't until 1903 that the New York State Prison System began fingerprinting criminals. A worldwide system began in 1924, and held ten million prints by 1946. In 1980, the FBI created the computerized Criminal Fingerprint File, which now allows requests for fingerprint identification to be processed and returned within one day. Currently, courts routinely use fingerprints from crime scenes in convictions.

http://ridgesandfurrows.homestead.com/early_pioneers.html