Timeline: Forensics 1700-1800

Period: Jan 1, 1700 to Dec 31, 1800

Forensics Timeline

Timeline of forensic advancements 1700-1800 Note: Any dates that are "16 Aug" or "17 Aug" are dates with only the year. (This will be the majority) The last handful of points are actually a source listing.

Aug 17, 1700

NEW KNOWLEDGE

Throughout this entire period, Germany and France experienced mass exhumation of corpses in order to study the insects that were in the bodies. The findings would not be published or made overly conclusive until the 1800s.

Aug 16, 1702

Poisonous Dictionary?

Richard Meade wrote a book known as "A Mechanical Account of Poisons" in which he covered numerous poisonous plants and animals.

Aug 17, 1723

Blackened Faces

The Black Act was passed where a poacher's face was blackened and those caught with poaching equipment could recieve a year in prison.

Aug 17, 1752

Guilty Lady

Mary Blandy was found guilty of murdering her father using arsenic and was hanged.

Aug 17, 1752

Punishing Murderers

Anyone found guilty of murder after this date was to be killed through dissection or hung in chains.

Aug 17, 1764

Influential Statements?

The Italian Cesare Beccaria writes an essay on the death penalty that ended up influencing several prominant abolitionists, including Benjamin Rush.

Aug 17, 1767

Snake Venom

Felice Fontana, an Italian chemist and physiologist, was one of the first to study venomous snakes, discovering that viper venom has an effect on blood.

Aug 16, 1775

Arsenic

Karl Wilhelm Scheele discovers arsenious oxide (As2O3) can be changed to arsenious acide (H3AsO3), something that later assists in the detection of arsenic.

Aug 16, 1775

Colonial Death Penalty

The United States use the Death Penalty in all 13 colonies/states

Aug 17, 1783

Solution so fowl

Fowler's Solution, a solution of potassium arsenite, was prescribed as a general tonic.

Aug 16, 1784

Physical Matching

In Britain, John Toms is convicted of murder due to a torn edge of some newspaper in a murder weapon (a pistol) matching a piece in his pocket; this is the first known use of physical matching.

Apr 30, 1787

Constitutional Death Penalty

While writing the Constitution of the United States, the Founding Fathers allow for the death penalty to be decided upon by the states.

Aug 17, 1789

Adipocere

Antoine Francois Fourcroy was examining disinterred bodies from the "Cemetry of Innocent" and described adipocere. He and Michel Augustin Thouret later find thta its chemical structure is similar to that of soap.

Apr 30, 1790

Congressional Death Penalty

The First US Congress establishes the Death Penalty.

Jun 25, 1790

First US Exection

In Massachusetts, Thomas Bird becomes the first person to be executed under the federal death penalty.

Aug 17, 1793

Removing the Death Penalty?

Due to several juries being reluctant to convict someone to death (as stated by Pennsylvania's Attorney General William Bradford anyway), several states adopt laws where the death penalty can only be brought into play on certain cases such as murder.

Aug 17, 1800