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Germanic and Slavic societies made law that medical experts must be the ones to determine 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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First pathology reports published. -
First recorded instance of physical matching of evidence leading to a murder conviction. 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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Clothing and shoes of a farm laborer were examined and found to match evidence of a nearby murder scene, where a young woman was found drowned in a shallow pool.
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James Marsh, an English chemist, uses chemical processes to determine arsenic as the cause of death in a murder trial.
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San Francisco uses photography for criminal identification, the first city in the US to do so.
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Galton's system identified the following patterns: plain arch, tented arch, simple loop, central pocket loop, double loop, lateral pocket loop, plain whorl, and accidental.
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Human blood grouping, ABO, discovered by Karl Landsteiner and adapted for use on bloodstains by Dieter Max Richter.
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First school of forensic science founded by Rodolphe Archibald Reiss, in Switzerland. -
Victor Balthazard and Marcelle Lambert publish the 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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Victor Balthazard realizes that tools used to make gun barrels never leave the same markings, and individual gun barrels leave identifying grooves on each bullet fired through it. He developed several methods of matching bullets to guns via photography.
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First police crime lab established in Los Angele
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Prototype polygraph, which was invented by John Larson in 1921, developed for use in police station
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A sound spectrograph discovered to be able to record voices. Voiceprints began to be used in investigations and as court evidence from recordings of phones, answering machines, or tape recorders. -
FBI established the National Crime Information Center, a computerized national filing system on wanted people, stolen vehicles and weapons.
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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 fingerprint reader installed at the FBI -
Royal Canadian Mounted Police implement first automatic fingerprint identification system.
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DNA fingerprinting techniques developed by Sir Alec Jeffreys. -
Tommy Lee Andrews convicted of a series of sexual assaults, using DNA profiling. -
National Academy of Sciences announces DNA evidence is reliable. -
FBI establishes the integrated automated fingerprint identification system, cutting down fingerprint inquiry response from two weeks to two hours.
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Britain's Forensic Science Service develops online footwear coding and detection system. This helps police to identify footwear marks quickly. -
A way for scientists to visualize fingerprints even after the print has been removed is developed, relating to how fingerprints can corrode metal surfaces.
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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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