How Has The Development Of Fingerprints Changed Over The Years

Fingerprints have been scientifically studied for a number of years in our society. The characteristics of fingerprints were studied as early as the 1600s. Meanwhile, using fingerprints as a means of identification first transpired in the mid-1800s. Sir William Herschel, in 1859, discovered that fingerprints do not change over time and that each pattern is unique to an individual. With these findings, he was the first to implement a system using fingerprints and handprints to identify an individual in 1877. At the time, his system was a simple one-to-one verification process. By 1896, police forces in India realized the benefit of using fingerprints to identify criminals, and they began collecting the fingerprints of prisoners along with their other measurements. With a growing database of fingerprint images, it soon became desirable to have an efficient manner of classifying the various images. Between 1896 and 1897, Sir Edward Henry developed the Henry Classification System, which quickly found worldwide acceptance within a few years. This system allows for logical categorization of a complete set of the

At the same time, the size of the databases continued to expand with each passing day. Therefore, it soon became difficult for teams of fingerprint experts to provide accurate results in a timely manner. In the early 1960s, the FBI, Home Office in the United Kingdom, and Paris Police Department began to devote a large amount of resources in developing automatic fingerprint identification systems. These systems allowed for an improvement in operational productivity among law enforcement agencies. At the same time, the automated systems reduced funding requirements to hire and train human fingerprint experts. Today, automatic fingerprint recognition technology can be found in a wide range of civilian applications.