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Fingerprint identification9/4/2023 Ideas to identify people could be pretty strange. For example in Bangor, Maine, USA, in 1849 the parents of Luther Hause misidentified a man who they believed to be their son as the imposter was able to show scars on his knee, chest and neck which were what the Hauses could remember about their son. However, it was quickly realised that it was quite easy to misidentify people as human memory is surprisingly rather terrible at actually remembering things. At first, body marks (such as moles, birthmarks, freckles and scars) were used as the primary identifiers. those believed to have been born to be a criminal and would create mass havoc for the law-abiding citizens. It became increasingly important to find ways to identify those with a criminal record, since brandings had gone out of fashion, and society feared the ‘habitual criminal’, i.e. The result was that it created a society of strangers, and as such made it very difficult to identify people based purely on the knowledge of the local community. In a world changed by the industrial revolution, many people were moving from the countryside to the city, as well as moving up and down the social scale. Prior to fingerprint identification, identity science was pretty limited. While the archaeological material can be dated to the 7th Century, additional evidence suggests that this practice occurred as early as the period of the Han Dynasty (220 BC – 202 BC- so to put this in context, Rome was not even an empire at this period.) In the medieval period, some wax seals from the Holy Roman Empire bore deep fingerprints, usually three in a line. In China there is evidence of fingerprint impressions made in clay which were then used for official documents. In Asia, Europe and North America there are cave paintings which feature fingerprints, possibly showing authorship and/or identity. Human knowledge of fingerprints is not new. Thanks though to the work of many pioneers, including Sir William Herschel, Henry Faulds, Francis Galton, Juan Vucetich and Sir Edward Henry, this dream eventually became a reality. For years the ability to identify people through their fingerprints remained simply a dream. It took about a century to create a viable identification system which could deal with masses of information efficiently.
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