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Germanic and Slavic societies made a law that medical experts must be the ones to determine the cause of death in crimes
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Fingerprints first used to determine identity. Arabic merchants would take a debtor's fingerprint and attach it to the bill.
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Chinese used fingerprints to establish identity of documents and clay sculpture, but without any formal classification system.
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An attorney in the Roman courts showed a bloody palm print to frame a blind man of his mother's murder.
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First forensic science manual published by the Chinese. It was called, Hsi DuanYu (the Washing Away of Wrongs). This was the first known record of medical knowledge being used to solve criminal cases.
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First recorded instance of physical matching of evidence leading to a murder conviction (John Toms, England). Evidence was a torn edge of newspaper in a pistol that matched newspaper in his pocket.
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The first recorded use of question document analysis occurred in Germany. A chemical test for a particular ink dye was applied to a document knows as the Konigin Hanschritt.
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The German scientist, Schonbein first discovered the ability of hemoglobin to oxidize hydrogen peroxide making it foam. This resulted in the first presumptive test for blood.
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Juan Vucetich, an Argentinean police officer, is the first to use fingerprints as evidence in a murder investigation. He created a system of fingerprint identification, which he named dactyloscopy.
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Human blood grouping, ABO, discovered by Karl Landsteiner and adapted for use on bloodstains by Dieter Max Richter. Image of Karl Landsteiner.
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Theodore Roosevelt established Federal Bureau of Investigation.
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FBI establishes its own crime laboratory, now one of the foremost crime labs in the world. This same year, a chair of legal medicine at Harvard was established.
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Technology developed at Aerospace Corporation in the US to detect gunshot residue, which can link a suspect to a crime scene, and can show how close that suspect was to the gun.
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First criminal caught with DNA evidence. DNA fingerprinting led to conviction of Colin Pitchfork in the murder of two teenage girls. This evidence cleared the main suspect in the case, who likely would have been convicted without it.
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Technology speeds up DNA profiling time, from 6-8 weeks to between 1-2 days
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Michigan state university develops software that automatically matches hand-drawn facial sketches to mug shots stored in databases.
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Japanese researchers develop a dental x-ray matching system. This system can automatically match dental x-rays in a database, and makes a positive match in less than 4 seconds.
