On the history of fingerprints as a crime-solving technique
Who Made Those Fingerprints? - NYTimes.com
In Argentina, a police inspector named Carlos Alvarez found a bloody thumbprint on a wood fragment near two murdered boys. Together with his colleague Juan Vucetich, who was working on a system called dactyloscopy — the art of reading the ridges of the finger — Alvarez matched the bloody mark to a thumbprint of the prime suspect, the mother of the dead children. Faced with this evidence, the woman broke down and confessed. It was a triumph for the new science.
In 1902, a Briton stole some billiard balls. When “fingerprints were found on a newly painted window sill” in the billiard room, they were used to convict him, wrote Richard Case, fingerprint specialist for the National Policing Improvement Agency in South Wales. Case was also an ancestor of the inspector who would first bring fingerprints into British courts.
By the 1920s, fingerprint collection had evolved into an art: “For light objects, use red bronze or Roman gold, which should be lightly applied with an atomizer,” advised J. A. Larson, an American whose early fingerprint-identification system never caught on.
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