History of Forensic Science

  • 700 BCE

    Fingerprints in the Early Years

    Chinese used fingerprints to establish identity of documents and clay sculptures.
  • 250 BCE

    Lie Detection

    Erasistratus was an ancient greek physician who observed that his patient's pulse rate increase when they tell a lie, which was the first lie detection in the early years.
  • First Case of Toxicology

    German Valentin Ross, a chemist, developed a way to detect arsenic in victims' stomach
  • Father of Forensic Toxicology

    Mathieu Joseph Bonaventure Orfilia was a Minorcan-born french toxicologist and chemist. He created new techniques in clearing up the accuracy of poisons.
  • 1816

    Clothing was used to find a murder of a girl that had drowned in a pool.
  • James Marsh

    James Marsh used a chemical process to determine the cause of death in a murder trial.
  • Photography

    The first city in the United States to use photography for criminal identification was San Francisco from 1854 to 1859
  • Fingerprints

    Henry Foulds found that all fingerprints were unique. Francis Galton, a scientist, adapted their finding for court.
  • Sherlock Holmes, and the Coroner

    Coroners act was established to determine the cause of sudden, violent, and unnatural deaths.
  • Juan Vucetich

    Juan Vucetich was the first to use and create a system for fingerprinting.
  • Karl Landsteiner

    Karl Landsteiner discovered human graphing and adopted use on blood traits by Detuv Max Richter
  • Identification

    New York state prison system imprinted fingerprints and identificated them
  • First School for Forensic Science

    Rodolphe Archibald Reiss founded the first school for forensic science in Switzerland.
  • First Forensic Crime Lab

    Los Angeles police crime lab was the first of many in the United States.
  • DNA

    James Watson and Francis Crick published in landmark paper identifying the structure of DNA.