Pre-fingerprinting

[xenith]

Local newspaper regularly runs a "100 Years Ago Today" bit where it reprints short bits from an 100 years ago. Late last year, possibly December, they had one announcing the introduction of fingerprinting to the Tasmanian Police force. So that's 1906, which seems quite a late development. It's not they were particularly slow down here in adopting fingerprinting -- Scotland Yard took it up in 1901 (and used it in the first murder case in 1905, prior to that it was used for identifying criminals using pseudonyms) & US Bureau of Identification establishes a fingerprint collection, 1902. There's a lot of playing around with fingerprinting in the 80s & 90s, and they were used in a murder case in Argentina in 1892. But generally, quite a late development.

So what did they use beforehand?

Library has Fingerprints: Murder and the race to uncover the science of identity, by Colin Beavan, which is the source of some of the above dates. Another interesting date is 1812 "In France, Francoise-Eugene Vidocq establishes Europe's first official detective branch and pioneers the use of physical evidence."

So the subject under consideration is "th use of physical evidence prior to fingerprinting". Now to get to the library