The History of Fingerprints

Ancient artifacts with carvings similar to friction

ridge skin have been discovered in many places
throughout the world. Picture writing of a hand
with ridge patterns was discovered in Nova
Scotia. In ancient Babylon, fingerprints were used
on clay tablets for business transactions.
BC 200s – China Chinese
records from the Qin
Dynasty (221-206 BC)
include details about using
handprints as evidence
during burglary
investigations.

Clay seals bearing friction

ridge impressions were
used during both the Qin
and Han Dynasties (221 BC
- 220 AD).
1858 - Sir William
Herschel, British
Administrator in
District in India,
requires fingerprint
and signatures on
civil contracts and
made a variety of
experiments and
soon realized that a
person's
fingerprints do not
change over time!
1880 - Dr. Henry Faulds,
the British Surgeon-
Superintendent of Tsukiji
Hospital in Tokyo, Japan,
took up the study of
"skin-furrows" after
noticing finger marks on
specimens of
"prehistoric" pottery.
A learned and
industrious man, Dr.
Faulds not only
recognized the
importance of
fingerprints as a means
of identification, but
devised a method of
classification as well.
1882 - Alphonse Bertillion, a
French anthropologist, devised
method of body measurements
to produce a formula used to
classify individuals. This formula
involves taking the
measurements of a persons
body parts, and recording these
measurements on a card. This
method of classifying and
identifying
people became known as the
Bertillion System.
1888 - Sir Francis Galton began publishing works
about fingerprints, identifying patterns, creating
a system of classification, and determining that
the odds of two people having the same
fingerprint were vanishingly small, thus making
them suitable for forensic work.
1892- Juan Vucetich was Argentine police
officer, the first to actually use his system to
convict a criminal.
1901 - Sir Edward Henry, an Inspector General of
Police in Bengal, India, develops the first
system of classifying fingerprints. This system
of classifying fingerprints. This system of
classifying fingerprints was first adopted as the
official system in England, and eventually
spread throughout.
1905 – U.S. Military adopts the use of fingerprints, soon
thereafter, police agencies began to adopt the use of
fingerprints.
1908 – The first official fingerprint card was developed.
1924 – Formation of Identification Division of FBI.
1980 – First computer data base of fingerprints was
developed, which came to be known as the Automated
Fingerprint Identification System, (AFIS). In the present
day, there nearly 70 million cards, or nearly 700 million
individual fingerprints entered in AFIS.
In the Philippines, fingerprinting started in 1900s through
the Americans. Mr. Jones taught the science of
fingerprinting in the Philippine Constabulary.
Capt. Thomas Dugan of the New York Police
Department and Flaviano C. Guerrero, a Filipino member
of the FBI helped to organize the fingerprinting in the NBI.
Augustin Patricio the first Filipino authority in
fingerprinting and who topped the first examination on
fingerprints given by Captain Thomas Dugon of the New
York Police Department
 In 1910, the Bureau of Corrections through Mr.
Generoso La Torre, also adopted fingerprint system for
identification of inmates. He learned the system from
Lt. George M. Wolfe, the first director of the bureau of
prisons from 1909 to 1910.

Generoso Reyes became the first Filipino fingerprint

technician employed in the Philippine Constabulary,
while Isabela Bernales was the first Filipina fingerprint
technician.
The earliest case using fingerprint
evidence to convict the suspect was
People of the Philippine Islands v.
Marciano D. Medina (G.R. No. L-38434,
December 23, 1933).
The establishment of crime laboratory system in the
Philippines was created at the end of the Second World
War. On May 19, 1945 it started as a section of G-2
Division of Military Police Command, then known as the
Fingerprint Record Section of the Philippine
Constabulary.
In 1946, Lt. Asa N. Darby facilitated the establishment of
complete fingerprint files in the Division of Investigation and
in the year that follows, it saw its reorganization into Bureau
of Investigation by virtue of the RA 157. It was finally
renamed as the National Bureau of Investigation when the
law was amended by Executive Order No. 94 issued on
October 4, 1947.
Plaridel College (now known as Philippine
College of Criminology) is the first recognized
school in the Philippines to offer Fingerprint
Identification as part of its academic curricula
in 1950.

In 1991 at the birth of Republic Act 6975, the

Crime Laboratory service was activated as a
support unit of the new Philippine National
Police under the Department of Interior and
Local Government (DILG). Later the PNP law
(RA 6975) was amended and the capability of
crime laboratory was enhanced.
Today, both the Philippine National Police and
the National Bureau of Investigation maintain a
fingerprint unit in their respective laboratories
for crime detection.
Filipino practitioners are trained either by the United States
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), England’s Scotland
Yard, or by the Japan International Coordinating Agency
(JICA).