1. History of Fingerprinting

• 1686: Marcello Malpighi, a professor of anatomy at the University of Bologna, noted ridges, spirals, and loops in fingerprints. Although he mentioned this, he did not mention there value as a tool of identification.
• 1823: John Evangelist Purkinje published his thesis discussing nine fingerprint patterns but did not mention there value to identification.
• 1858: Sir William James Hershel first used fingerprints on native contracts. He only did this to scare the people for if they wanted to back out of a signed contract. This was the first way that the English used fingerprints as identification.
• 1882: Gilbert Thompson used his own thumb print on a document to prevent forgery.
• 1891: Juan Vucetic began the first fingerprint files.
• 1903: The New York State Prison system began using fingerprints for criminals.
• 1905: U.S. Army begins using fingerprints
• 1907: U.S. Navy begins using fingerprints
• 1908: U.S. Marine Corps starts using fingerprints
• 1946: The FBI had processed 100 million fingerprint cards in manually maintained files

http://www.onin.com/fp/fphistory.html