3.1.5: Dr. Henry Faulds

If you were to ask anyone in Scotland the name of the founder of fingerprint identification, they will proudly exclaim, “It was Doctor Henry Faulds and no other!” Far be it for your author to disagree. Henry Faulds studied medicine at what is now the University of Strathclyde, Scotland. Upon becoming a doctor, Henry Faulds became a missionary of the Church of Scotland and travelled to Japan where he established his ministry at the Tsukiji Hospital in Tokyo in 1874. While visiting an archeological dig with a friend, Dr. Faulds became fascinated by finger marks impressed into ancient clay tablets. He surmised this was a form of identification used in antiquity. This began a life-long interest in fingerprints and the marks they leave behind. Dr. Faulds also had an opportunity to put his interest into real-world use when the laboratory at the hospital was burgled, and the person suspected of the crime was a young colleague. Dr. Faulds found a broken beaker that had a greasy fingerprint deposited on the side. He compared this patent, or observable, fingerprint to the fingerprints of his colleague and determined that he did not deposit the greasy print, thus proving his innocence. He wrote articles which were published in the English journal Nature in which he described his observations of fingerprints and advocated their use in criminal detection. He proposed using printers’ ink as a medium by which a person’s fingerprints could be recorded. It should be noted that Dr. Faulds wrote an article describing individual characteristics within the patterns of fingerprints in 1905, but this was after the publications of our next hero of fingerprint comparison, Sir Francis Galton.

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