Fingerprint

Fingerprints were used as signatures in ancient Babylon in the second millennium BC.

By 246 BC, Chinese officials were impressing their fingerprints into the clay seals used to seal documents.

The English first began using fingerprints on July 28, 1858, when on a whim Sir William Herschel, Chief Magistrate of the Hooghly district in Jungipoor, India, had Rajyadhar Konai, a local businessman, impress his hand print on a contract. The native was suitably impressed, and Herschel made a habit of requiring prints on every contract made with the locals. He later established a fingerprint register.

Exemplar prints on paper using ink

The first man to be convicted of a crime in the UK by fingerprint evidence was Harry Jackson in on September 13, 1902. He had stolen some billiard balls from a shop in Birmingham, England, and left his thumbprint in wet paint on a window sill. This was a landmark case in the development of fingerprint identification. It showed that fingerprints could be used as reliable evidence to convict criminals, and it helped to establish the science of fingerprinting as a valuable tool for law enforcement.

Before police used fingerprints to identify individuals, they used a system called Bertillonage which used several measurements of different body parts. It lost popularity when in 1903 a pair of nearly identical strangers ended up in the same prison, Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas. This helped fingerprinting become widely accepted by law enforcement agencies in the U.S.

Cattle rustler John Walker's fingerprints were the first ones to be exchanged by police officials in Europe and America. Law enforcement units in London and St. Louis, Missouri completed the exchange on July 6, 1905.

Oskaloosa, Iowa, was the first US township to fingerprint all of its citizens, including children, on May 21, 1934. The fingerprinting program in Oskaloosa was met with mixed reactions. Some people were concerned about the invasion of privacy, while others believed that it was a necessary step to keep the community safe. The program was eventually discontinued after a few years, but it is still remembered as a pioneering effort in the field of crime prevention.

The first person convicted of a crime based on DNA fingerprinting evidence was Colin Pitchfork who raped and murdered two girls in November 1983, and July 1986. He was arrested on September 19, 1987, and sentenced to life imprisonment on January 22, 1988, after admitting both murders.

Prisoner being fingerprinted.

Despite sharing their genes, identical twins do not have identical fingerprints, even at birth. This is because fingerprints are not entirely a genetic characteristic and are partially determined by the interaction of an individual’s genes and the intrauterine environment.

Some people never develop fingerprints at all. Two rare genetic defects, known as Naegeli syndrome and dermatopathia pigmentosa reticularis, can leave carriers without any identifying ridges on their skin.

Workers who cut up pineapples eventually lose their fingerprints due to the action of the proteolytic enzyme, bromelain, that dissolves them.

Cops will often touch the tail light of a car that they just pulled over so that if anything were to happen to the officer during the encounter, there would be physical evidence of them coming into contact with your vehicle via fingerprints.

A fetus doesn't develop fingerprints three months of gestation.