The History and Science of Fingerprints

2 min readJan 21, 2020

Assorted about Fingerprinting — its science and history.

Much of the English-language literature on the history of scientific detection tends to treat fingerprint identification as a purely British invention which was then exported to the Americas and the rest of the world. This version of history has Scotland Yard delivering the Henry system to the New World shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. Although the British did play an important role in developing modern fingerprint identification, Americans had begun to think about-and in Argentina actually implement-fingerprint identification even before the British began promoting the Henry system.’
North and South America proved fertile ground for innovation in fingerprint gerprint identification. The expanding nations of the Americas were “societies of strangers” to a much greater extent than Europe, where many people could still be identified by familial and geographic ties. The Americas were on the receiving end of the great waves of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Immigrant cultures mingled the promise of the chance to start anew with a fresh identity-unfettered by the mistakes or status one left behind in the Old World-with a profound suspicion of strangers. Many immigrants were viewed as racially “other,” with all the biases and blinders that conceptualization entailed, by immigrants who had arrived a generation tion or more earlier. Thus, as in the British Empire, innovation in fingerprint identification in the Americas was stimulated by a perceived need to identify “faceless,” racially unfamiliar “hordes” of people who came in successive waves to their shores.

Simon A. Cole. Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification