When Did Fingerprinting Begin?

The skin on the tip of your finger has a network of ridges, and the pattern that these ridges form is called your fingerprint. Everyone has fingerprints, but no two people have ever had the same ones!

The idea of using fingerprints to identify people began late in the 19th century, when Francis Galton, an English scientist, proved that no two sets of fingerprints were the same.

Then an English police official named Edward Henry devised a way to classify fingerprints, so that a set of fingerprints in police files could be easily matched with .a set found at the scene of a crime.

Today, fingerprint classification is one of the greatest weapons police use in their fight against crime. The FBI alone has more than 100 million sets of prints on file!