1888 SIR FRANCIS GALTON
Sir Francis Galton, a British anthropologist and a cousin of Charles Darwin, began his observations of fingerprints as a means of identification in the 1880’s. In 1892, he published his book ‘Fingerprints’, establishing the individuality and permanence of fingerprints.
The book included the first classification system for fingerprints. Galton’s primary interest in fingerprints was as an aid in determining heredity and racial background. While he soon discovered that fingerprints offered no firm clues to an individual’s intelligence or genetic history, he was able to scientifically prove what Herschel and Faulds already suspected:
That fingerprints do not change over the course of an individual’s lifetime, and that no two fingerprints are exactly the same.
According to his calculations, the odds of two individual fingerprints being the same were 1 in 64 billion. Galton identified the characteristics by which fingerprints can be identified. These same characteristics (minutia) are basically still in use today, and are often referred to as Galton’s details.