Page 45 - Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS)

30 AUTOMATED FINGERPRINT IDENTIFICATION SYSTEMS

Table 2.1
AFIS Timetable: Early Year Event
Prints
1858 Sir William Herschel, employed by the Civil Service of India, records a hand
print on the back of a contract. a
1880 Dr. Henry Faulds determines that fingerprints can be classified, ridge detail is
unique, and fingerprints can be used to solve crimes.
1883 Alphonse Bertillon builds database of criminals using anatomical
measurements.
1892 Sir Francis Galton publishes Fingerprinting.
1900 Sir Edward Henry publishes Classification and Use of Fingerprints.
1903 Captain Parke begins to fingerprint inmates using the American Classification
System.
1915 International Association for Criminal Identification is formed, later to
become the IAI.
1919 International Association for Identification (IAI) is incorporated.
1924 Congress requires the collection of identification and criminal records.
Identification Bureau is created.
1946 FBI has 100 million fingerprint records.

a
See Ashbaugh, Quantitative-Qualitative Friction Ridge Analysis.

with the hand of the worker, it would either match or not match. If they
matched, the worker was authenticated as the person who signed the contract.
If they did not match, there was no other method to determine who owns the
image on the contract. It was a yes or no determination.
The collection of these images did not require special handling or filing so
long as they were few in number. But as the acceptance of inked impression as
a unique identifier grew, so did the need to be able to classify the images. A
major milestone occurred in 1880, when Dr. Henry Faulds proposed that ridge
detail is unique, and because of that, fingerprints can be classified and used to
solve crimes. He also implied that the Chinese had used a fingerprint identifi-
cation system “from early times.”
This was a major breakthrough in the use of inked impressions. Faulds had
suggested that there was a way to name the flow of the friction ridges, a method
of distinguishing the pattern of the finger image. He implied that the friction
ridge patterns for each person are unique, that no two are identical. This
uniqueness would provide certainty of the identity. The proposition that finger
images could be used to solve crimes moved finger images beyond purely civil
applications, as in the case of contracts, into the forensic arena.
During this same time, other biometrics were becoming of interest; finger-
prints were not the only identifier under consideration. While the modern term
biometric may not have been widely known or understood, various methods of
associating some unique physical aspect with only one person were emerging.
Among these new biometrics was a system developed in France by Alphonse