A Short History of Fingerprinting Essay -- Exploratory Essays

A Short History of Fingerprinting The employ of fingerprinting as a means of identification was born egress of the need of law enforcement officials to have permanent records that could determine if a yard bird had been previously arrested or imprisoned. Before the advent of fingerprinting, law enforcement used a number of different methods to try to accomplish this. Ancient civilizations would tattoo or physically maim prisoners. In more recent sentences, daguerreotyping (that is, photographing) was used, but proven to be less than reliable, because people had the ability to dramatically alter their demeanor (Skopitz). As a result, this method too, became obsolete with the discovery of fingerprinting, an absolutely undeniable method of identification. Variations of fingerprinting have existed since the very beginning of civilization. Originally, it was used earlier as a type of signature. However, in the Fourteenth Century, it was discovered by a P ersian official that no two people had analogous fingerprints (The History of Fingerprints). Over the next 300 years or so, in that location was little development in fingerprinting, except for the work of two professors, Marcelo Malpighi and arse Evangelist Purkinji. Each had works on types of fingerprint patterns published - Malpighi in 1686 and Purkinji in 1823 (The History of Fingerprints). The middle to late Nineteenth Century was the time when interest in fingerprinting peaked and a number of measurable discoveries were made. This all started with the English Chief Magistrate in India, Sir William Herschel, who required natives to have their fingerprints affect on all business contracts, a tradition which dated screen thousands of years (The Hi... ...y in recent years was the computerization of the process. Fingerprints are forthwith stored and matched using computers. Fingerprinting is still used in criminal investigations, although deoxyribonucleic ac id testing is becoming increasingly prevalent and will likely, in cases in which such evidence is available, eventually replace fingerprinting (Skopitz).Brief epitome of Sourceshttp//onin.com/fp/fphistory.html - This place provides a list of people who made significant advancements in fingerprinting. The list is structured chronologically by the date on which the advancements were made.http//kyky.essortment.com/fingerprinthist_rmmv.htm - This site provides a more detailed history of fingerprinting. It describes methods of identification used introductory to the advent of fingerprinting, follows the development of fingerprinting, and speculates on the future of fingerprinting.