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In western culture, the earliest record of the study of the patterns on human hands, by Dr. Nehemiah who wrote a paper describing the patterns that he saw on human hands under a microscope.
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Johann Christoph Andreas Mayer described that "the arrangement of skin ridges is never duplicated in two persons."
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Jan Evangelist Purkyn described nine distinct fingerprint patterns, including loops, spirals, circles, and double whorls.
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The system called Bertillonage, was first used to identify a repeating offender.
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Juan Vucetich, an Argentine Police Official, began the first fingerprint files based on Galton pattern types.
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Sir Edmund Richard Henry, with the help of two colleagues, created a system that divided fingerprint records into groups based on whether they have an arch, whorl, or loop pattern.
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The Council of the Governor General of India approved a committee report that fingerprints should be used for the classification of criminal records. Later that year, the Calcutta Anthropometric Bureau became the world's first Fingerprint Bureau. Working in the Calcutta Anthropometric Bureau were Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose.
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U.S. Department of Justice forms the Bureau of Criminal Identification in Washington, DC to provide a centralized reference collection of fingerprint cards.
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Hakon Jörgensen with the Copenhagen, Denmark Police lectures about the distant identification of fingerprints at the International Police Conference in Monaco.
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Edmond Locard wrote that if twelve points were the same between two fingerprints, it would suffice as a positive identification.
