Chapter 1

History of Fingerprint Pattern Recognition

Simon A. Cole

Abstract. This article summarizes the major developments in the history of efforts to use
fingerprint patterns to identify individuals, from the earliest fingerprint classification systems
of Vucetich and Henry in the 1890s through the advent of automated fingerprint identification.
By chronicling the history of “manual” systems for recording storing, matching, and retrieving
fingerprints, the article puts advances in automatic fingerprint recognition in historical context
and highlights their historical and social significance.

1.1. Introduction
The modern history of fingerprint identification begins in the late 19th century with the
development of identification bureaus charged with keeping accurate records about
individuals indexed, not according to name, but according to some physical attribute.
Only in the 19th century were modern states bureaucratic enough to presume to
maintain organized criminal records that extended beyond a single parish or locality
[81]. Early criminal records indexed by name were vulnerable to subversion by the
simple expedient of adopting an alias. Hence there developed the idea of indexing
records according to some bodily feature. An early, extremely cumbersome, effort was
the British Register of Distinctive Marks, which listed convicts according to some
distinctive feature like a birthmark, scar, or tattoo [82]. The demand for criminal
histories was in large part driven by changes in jurisprudence. A shift of focus from
the criminal act to the criminal individual demanded more complete and more accurate
knowledge about each offender’s criminal history. This would enable individualized
penal “treatment” and differential punishment of first-time offenders and recidivists
[30, 60].
Although there is a long and murky prehistory of uses of fingerprints to authen-
ticate the identity of individuals, principally in Asia [8, 51, 91], it was not until the
late 19th century that efforts were made to use fingerprints for the more technically
demanding process of identification—that is, rather than merely verifying whether or
not an individual is claiming the correct identity, selecting the correct identity of an
unknown individual from a large database of possible identities.
2 Simon A. Cole

The cradle of the modern fingerprint system was colonial India, where British ad-
ministrators were concerned about maintaining social control over the native popula-
tion. A workable identification system was desired for numerous purposes, including
combatting fraud through impersonation in the disbursement of what today would
be called “entitlements,” such as pensions; resolving disputed identities in civil legal
disputes over land deeds or contracts; monitoring the movement of targetted popula-
tion groups, such as the so-called criminal tribes; and maintaining criminal histories
of persons convicted of crimes [68].
Sir William Herschel, grandson of the Astronomer Royal William Herschel and
son of the polymath John Herschel, a colonial administrator in the Hooghly district of
Bengal, helped bring fingerprints to the attention of British scientists and bureaucrats.
Although Herschel recorded his first inked handprint on a road-building contract with
Rajyadhar Kōnāi in 1858, it was not until 1877, after two decades of dallying with
fingerprints, that he formally proposed that “sign-manuals,” as he called them, be used
to identify individuals. Herschel tried to characterize his 1858 print as an inventive
act, but it seems more likely that it was inspired by tip sahi, a Bengali practice of
signing documents with a fingertip dabbed in ink [15, 40].
British awareness of the potential utility of fingerprint patterns was further stimu-
lated by Henry Faulds, a Scottish physician doing missionary work in Tokyo. Faulds
wrote a letter to Nature describing how he happened upon fingerprint patterns on
ancient Japanese ceramics and proposing that their use be investigated for criminal
identification purposes. Faulds also described some brief research establishing that
Gibraltar monkeys and the various human races all shared the same basic pattern
structure and an episode in which he actually used a “greasy finger-mark” to solve
a petty crime at the embassy [24]. Herschel hastily answered Faulds’ letter with one
of his own, asserting his priority in the “discovery” of fingerprints, if not in publica-
tion [39]. This set off a priority dispute between Herschel and Faulds that would last
more than 50 years [7, 89]. In fact, Thomas Taylor, a microscopist at the U.S. De-
partment of Agriculture, had beaten both men to publication by three years [22, 79].
Faulds’ claim to have made the earliest forensic fingerprint identification, meanwhile,
turns out to have been anticipated, though quickly forgotten, more than two decades
earlier by John Maloy, a constable in Albany, New York [16].

1.2. The Development of Fingerprint Classification Systems

As a means of individual identification, fingerprints faced a formidable rival, the
anthropometric system of identification, devised by Alphonse Bertillon, a Paris po-
lice official and son of the famous demographer Louis–Adolphe Bertillon [9, 64].
Although the Bertillon system required strenuous efforts to ensure consistency be-
tween operators in taking delicate measurements of “osseus lengths,” it enjoyed a
crucial advantage. Since Bertillon’s system was indexed according to easily quan-
tifiable anthropometric measurments, he was able—for the first time—to devise a
feasible system for indexing individualized records according to physical attributes
rather than names. Fingerprint patterns did not possess any such inherent mechanism