-
Fingerprints are used on clay tablets for business transaction in ancient Babylon.
-
An ancient Greek physician, Erasistratus, discovers that his patients’ pulse rates increase when they are telling lies.
-
A murder was committed using a sickle, which is a type of curved looking knife. All those in the village who owned one were made to bring them out and lay them in the sun, eventually flies gathered on one particular sickle, identifying it as the murder weapon.
-
Bartolomeo da Varignana performed one of the first medicinal autopsy.
-
Missing teeth of the French Duke of Burgundy are used to identify his remains.
-
-
A man of England is convicted of murder because of a torn paper found in a pistol matching a remaining piece in his pocket. One of the first documented uses of physical matching.
-
Henry Goddard of Scotland Yard first uses bullet comparison to catch a murderer.
-
Taylor and Wilkes write a paper on the determination of time since death from fall in body temperature, introducing many current concepts we still use!
-
The use of photography for the identification of criminals and the documentation of evidence and crime scenes.
-
They started using fingerprints for evidence in CSI cases.
-
Henry Faulds of Scotland publishes a paper suggesting fingerprints at the scene of a crime could identify the offender. Faulds uses fingerprints to eliminate an innocent suspect and indicate a Tokyo burglary.
-
John Larson and Leonard Keeler design the portable polygraph.
-
Dental records are compared with teeth from corpses.
-
R. F. Borkenstein invents the Breathalyzer for field sobriety testing.
-
-
The FBI introduces the beginnings of its Automated Fingerprint Idrntification System, with first computerised scans of fingerprints.
-
Start of our path on dna recognition, geneticists discover a region of DNA that does not hold any genetic information and is extremely variable between individuals.
-
DNA is used for the first time to solve a crime
-
The Forensic Science Service launches the UK’s first online footwear coding and detection management system, Footwear Intelligence Technology.
