Exactly 180 years ago today, Henry Faulds was born in North Ayrshire, Scotland. His family was not wealthy, so when he was just 13 he had to leave school and work as a clerk to help support them. But when he was 21 he went back to school, enrolling at Glasgow University to study math and logic.
He graduated, and went on to become a physician. He became a medical missionary, and was sent to India, then in 1874 helped establish a hospital in Japan. Faulds learned Japanese, and in addition to his job as a doctor he became a writer, publishing books about travel to Japan, academic articles, and founded three magazines.
But he’s not remembered for his literary work. His signature accomplishment came when a friend of his who was an archaeologist invited him to a dig. He helped find some ancient clay fragments, and noticed the impressions in the clay left by the fingers of the makers. This gave him an idea, and he began examining the tips of the fingers of everyone he knew — and that convinced him that the patterns of ridges on fingers were unique to every individual.
The big test came soon afterward, when somebody broke into his hospital. The police arrested a subject, but Faulds examined he crime scene and discovered…fingerprints! And the prints didn’t match those of the accused. Faulds managed to convince the police that his evidence was significant, and they released the person they’d arrested. On the other hand, at the time nobody in the world had actually been “fingerprinted,” so Faulds’ evidence didn’t help catch the real burglar.
Faulds pursued fingerprinting, and by the 1890s it was beginning to be widely used. But William Herschel, a civil servant in British India, wrote to the journal Nature claiming that he had been using fingerprints since 1860 — Faulds hadn’t published his first article until 1880. This created a years-long controversy about who had really “invented” (or noticed) fingerprinting. Faulds eventually returned to England, became a police surgeon, and stewed about not getting enough recognition for his fingerprint work.
Nowadays William Herschel is thought to be the first to notice fingerprints as a unique identifier, and Faulds was the first to publish anything on the subject — but it was Francis Galton, one of those “gentleman scientists” from the Victorian era, who amassed the first scientific evidence that fingerprints really were unique, and it’s actually Galton’s work that managed to convince official organizations to use fingerprints as identifiers. On the other hand, a scientist named Mayers suggested that “the arrangement of skin ridges is never duplicated in two persons.” And he wrote that back in 1788. Even today, the idea has never been proven — it’s just a statistical assumption. One that would probably have made Faulds even grumpier.
