Fingerprint Timeline

  • 650

    Kia Kung-Yen

    Kia Kung-Yen
    Chinese historian who suggested that fingerprints could be used to authenticate,
  • Johann Christoph Andreas Mayer

    Johann Christoph Andreas Mayer
    Was the first European to recognize that fingerprints are unique to an individual.
  • Jan Evangelista Purkyně

    Jan Evangelista Purkyně
    Identified nine fingerprint patterns
  • Georg von Meissner

    Georg von Meissner
    German anatomist who studied friction ridges in detail,
  • Henry Faulds

    Henry Faulds
    Suggested that fingerprints are unique to a human. He published his first paper on the usefulness of fingerprints for identification and proposed a method to record them with ink.
  • Francis Galton

    Francis Galton
    Published Finger Prints in 1892 which covered a detailed statistical model of fingerprint analysis and ID'ing. He said a false positive would come up in one in 64 billion
  • Scheffer case

    Scheffer case
    The first case of the ID, arrest and conviction of a murderer from fingerprint evidence. Alphonse Bertillon identified the killer.
  • New York Prisons and FBI

    New York Prisons and FBI
    New York prisons started using fingerprinting in their system in 1903 and the FBI followed shortly after.
  • Juan Vucetich

    Juan Vucetich
    Created the first method of recording fingerprints and the method to keep it on file.
  • Integrated AFIS

    Integrated AFIS
    This system can categorize, search and retrieve fingerprints from across the country in a short amount of time.