Finger Prints By Colin Beavan It was the 1902 homicides, outside of London, of shop owners Thomas Farrow and his wife, Ann that changed the origin of crime detection and catapulted forensic science forever. Evidence found at the scene of the crime, a metal box with a single smudged fingerprint, was the first time in history that this type of evidence was used to convict and hang the culprits that were found to be guilty of murder. The suggested use of using fingerprints as a method of criminal analysis was first introduced in October 1880, by Henry Faulds, a medical missionary working in Japan. Faulds spent many years trying to convince the Scotland Yards to embrace his theory as he had outlined in his Nature article. Instead of embracing …show more content…
Galton’s thoughts were that if the owners’ prints were hereditary then It was possible that certain family characteristics like physical strength, degrees of intelligence and dexterity could be revealed in each of their intricate ridge patterns. His theory was that children of intellectually and physically superb parents would make them more superior to other children. In 1892 Galton published Finger Prints in which he characterized his classification system of including three main fingerprint patterns - loops, whorls and arches. This theory sparked the interest of Edward Henry, Inspector General of Police in Bengal, India because at that time the only alternative to fingerprinting was Bertillonage, also known as Anthropometry. This method was created by Alphonse Bertillon in 1879 and it consisted of taking meticulous measurements of body parts as a way of identifying criminals. Henry along with his assistant refined a system that logically filed fingerprints according to ridge patterns which made it much easier to distinguish the prints without having to forage through thousands of prints. This system came to be known as the Henry Classification