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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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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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German chemist Valentin Ross developed a method of detecting arsenic in a victim's stomach, thus advancing the investigation of poison deaths.
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San Francisco uses photography for criminal identification, the first city in the US to do so.
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The English first began using fingerprints on July 28, 1858, when on a whim Sir William Herschel, Chief Magistrate of the Hooghly district in Jungipoor, India, had Rajyadhar Konai, a local businessman, impress his hand print on a contract.
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Henry Faulds was a Scottish physician, missionary, and scientist who is noted for the development of fingerprinting.
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British scientist Sir Francis Galton is often credited with the discovery that everyone's fingerprints are unique and that they could therefore be used for identification.
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At Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1892, Inspector Eduardo Alvarez made the first criminal fingerprint identification. He was able to identify Francisca Rojas, a woman who murdered her two sons and cut her own throat in an attempt to place blame on another
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Mass forensic identification by dentition was first used at Paris, in the aftermath of the fire of the Bazaar de la Charité that began around 16:00 h on the afternoon of May 4, 1897. About 1200 people were in the bazaar at the time.
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Early versions of fingerprint powders were generally handmade by latent print examiners or police crime scene technicians. In the early 1900's, commercially-available powders were being produced, with some, most notably Lightning Powder® with its origin in 1936, still in business today.
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devises a method to distinguish between human and animal blood.
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was the first man to be convicted in the United Kingdom via fingerprint evidence. On 27 June 1902 a burglary occurred in a house in Denmark Hill, London, and some billiard balls were stolen.
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Victor Balthazard and Marcelle Lambert publish first study on hair, including microscopic studies from most animals. First legal case ever involving hair also took place following this study.
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State of New York adopts the medical examiner system.
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August Vollmer, chief of the Los Angeles Police, established the first American police crime laboratory in 1924
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One of the first published accounts involving a conviction based on bite marks as evidence was the “Gorringe case”, in 1948, in which pathologist Keith Simpson used bite marks on the breast of the victim to seal a murder conviction against Robert Gorringe for the murder of his wife Phyllis.
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Detection of gunshot residue by SEM/EDS is developed.
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1986 was when DNA was first used in a criminal investigation by Dr.Jeffreys. 1986. The investigation used genetic fingerprinting in a case of two rapes and murders that had happened in 1983 and 1986. These crimes happened in a small town called Leicestershire, which is located in the United Kingdom.
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The National DNA Index System (NDIS) becomes operational.
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is the first university in the world solely dedicated to forensic and investigative science. It was created by Act 17 passed in the Gujarat Legislative Assembly on 30 September 2008.
