FINGERPRINTS

A lively, fascinating recounting of how fingerprints came to be a means of criminal identification, with emphasis on the personalities, claims, and peccadilloes of the men involved.

Journalist Beavan (Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, etc.) opens with the murder in 1902 of two shopkeepers in a village near London. At the trial that followed, fingerprint evidence for the first time led to the conviction of two killers, ensuring the widespread acceptance of fingerprinting as a tool of law enforcement. Ironically, Henry Faulds, who had spent years trying unsuccessfully to get Scotland Yard and other police departments around the world to adopt fingerprinting, sided with the defense, asserting that the uniqueness of a single fingerprint had never been scientifically established. Faulds, a Scottish missionary working in Japan who had observed how the Japanese used fingerprints to mark pottery, was the first to suggest fingerprinting as a method of criminal identification, proposing many of the elements of a fingerprint system in an 1880 issue of the prestigious British science journal Nature. It was ignored. When, in 1888, Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, a well-known scientist, published an article on the study of fingerprints, Edward Henry, a English police chief in India, where fingerprints had for some time been used to identify signers of documents, took notice. When his assistant, Azizul Hague, developed a practical classification system based on ridge patterns, Henry, who received the credit, was recalled to London in 1901 to set up Scotland Yard’s fingerprint branch. While focusing much of his attention on the development of fingerprinting in England and on Faulds’s struggle for recognition of his role in it, Beavan also describes the competing system of identification developed by the Frenchman Alphonse Bertillon, which was based on elaborate measurements of human body parts. (For a look at Bertillon and his early method of criminal identification, see Simon A. Cole, below.) Included, too, are dramatic cases of imposters and mistaken identity that illustrate the need for a reliable identification system. Thirty-six line drawings and halftones.

Beavan admirably brings to vivid life the tangled human tale behind a technological breakthrough. (36 line drawings and halftones)