Did you know that there are a weird group of people that have no fingerprints.
Neither did I till I investigated the
Scotsman who invented fingerprinting. It s a story of twists, turns,
arches, swoops and whorls as well as intrigue...
and being Scottish, it goes without saying
that there s some bitter sadness along the way. So if you re interested in the people, places and
events in Scottish history click the subscribe button at the bottom right of the screen
and ring the notification bell to be told when I upload new videos.
In the meantime let me tell you a story. This is the Japanese Consulate in Edinburgh.
If you re wondering why it s linked to fingerprinting then stick around...
You see not only will today s story take us to Japan and back,
but before this was the Japanese consulate it was the home of the father of forensic medicine.
He s Scottish I tell you more
about him in my video The Scotsman who was the real Sherlock Holmes...,
there ll be a link at the end..., but today s story is about
another Victorian Scotsman who doesn t get the recognition he deserves.
In Ayrshire there s a town called Beith. In that town there s a street called
New Street.... and this is it.
Of course, it s not as new today as it was on 1st June 1843.
That s the date Henry Faulds was born into a comfortably off Presbyterian family.
When he was twelve, life became considerably less comfortable
because of the fraudulent collapse of City of Glasgow Bank.
That was in the good old days when dodgy bankers went to jail.
So now the young Henry Faulds has to leave school,
get a job as a clerk, then as an apprentice with a shawl manufacturer.
Eventually he d made enough to go to Glasgow University and study Maths, Logic and classics,
before changing to study medicine, for which he went across town to what
became Strathclyde University. By the time he was finished
there he was nearly thirty. Not only had he got a medical licence,
but he d got religion as well. Better become a missionary
Off to India to become a Church of Scotland medical missionary in Darjeeling...
more tea vicar What about sake.
In 1873 he married Isabella and just before Christmas headed
off to Japan where he... established the first English speaking mission to Japan,
opened a hospital, started a teaching facility, founded a society for the blind,
set up lifeguard stations, wrote two travel books and three magazines,
started a SCHOOL for the blind, stopped a rabies epidemic helped stop a
cholera epidemic and cured a plague of fish. It wasn t a plague of fish,
like fish swarming up the High St it was the fish who had the plague
in a fishmonger s shop. The point is that as other
Scotsmen like Thomas Blake Glover and Henry Brunton were transforming Japan,
Henry Faulds was making his own impact. I ll leave a link top right if you want
to come back and watch a video
about the incredible Thomas Blake Glover. The point is that Scotsmen had their sticky
little fingers all over Japan... Oh, that s right... fingerprints
Henry Faulds also took an interest in archaeology...
because of course he did. Anyway he went on a dig with
an American archaeologist pal, and on that dig Faulds noticed
that ancient pottery they dug up had markings of lines and swirls
captured from potter s fingers in the clay when it was wet,
retained as it dried, and preserved over the centuries
as fossilised fingerprints. Of course, he didn t call them fingerprints...
but a few months earlier when he d been lecturing students on touch
he had noticed the swirling ridges on his own fingertips...
and he made the connection between these and the ridges created by the ancient potters.
Over the next couple of years he delved into investigation of fingerprints with
a scientific approach. He shaved the ridges off
his own and some medical students fingers... and they grew back in exactly the same pattern.
When there was an epidemic of scarlet fever precipitating skin peeling,
he watched the finger ridges grow back in exactly the same pattern
He recorded babies teency weency fingers and watched them grow
with unchanging patterns. Over time he came to the conclusion
that each person has a unique fingerprint. Now I know it seems obvious now
or does it? Imagine you were the Swiss woman who in 2007
tried to enter the US, but fell foul of the biometric identification
and got turned back at the border... because you had no fingerprints.
Don t talk soft. Everyone s got fingerprints.
Well
it turned out eight other members of her extended family
didn t have fingerprints either. Imagine it s November 2017,
and you re a 66-year-old bloke who s bank s introducing biometric security,
but after repeated attempts to scan your fingerprints
the machine found no discernible pattern. What would you say?
I ll tell you what you d say... adermatoglyphia, that s what you d say.
Adermatoglyphia is the condition that affects
a small number of people around the world who ve got missing or non-existent fingerprints.
Sometimes it s congenital, sometimes it s acquired.
There are various genetic and medical conditions that cause
some people to lose their fingerprints. Given the modern world and the discovery
by that Swiss woman on the American border adermatoglyphia has become known as "immigration
delay disease,". I m told brown skin,
or a Mexican accent can cause the same symptoms. Of course, nobody knew all of this in early 1880.
When Faulds made his discovery he wrote to the elderly Charles Darwin,
another guy who stole big ideas from unrecognised Scots
...and asked him for help. Darwin said it was too much for him, but he d pass
Faulds letter on to his cousin Frances Galton, who sent it to the Anthropological
Society of London. Nobody was interested...
...but Faulds had tested his theory in practise. When the Tokyo hospital was
robbed of some surgical alcohol a sticky-fingered print gave the culprit away,
and when the offender confessed, this was the first time ever
that a fingerprint had proved the guilt of a crime.
Soon after a thief climbed a wall near Faulds house and left sooty
fingerprints on the whitewashed surface. The police arrested a likely suspect,
but when Faulds took his fingerprints, it turned out they didn t match
the ones on the wall. When they found the real
culprit with matching prints, this was the first time both
innocence and guilt were proven by the use of the same fingerprints.
Faulds wrote to the journal Nature and his paper "On the Skin-Furrows of the Hand," was published
on October 28, 1880. He made two observations
One, When bloody finger-marks or impressions on clay, glass etc., exist,
they may lead to the scientific identification of criminals, and Two
A common slate or smooth board of any kind, or a sheet of tin, spread over very
thinly and evenly with printer's ink, is all that is required [to take fingerprints]."
This was the first time anyone had suggested how fingerprints could be used to find criminals.
...and he suggested that registers should be kept of
"the for-ever-unchangeable finger-furrows of important criminals."
Henry Faulds was recognised for his insightful discovery and lauded as
the inventor of fingerprinting Not long after Faulds paper was
published a British civil servant called Sir William Herschel,
wrote to Nature from India, claiming that he had been using fingerprints
as a means of identity for ages. He just never mentioned it.
Did I tell you my name was SIR William Herschel? Did I tell you that I ll be doing more Stories
of Scotland stand-up comedy shows in 2024 in Scotland, Canada and maybe even England.
Click the link top right or in the description for details.
When Faulds came back to Britain in 1886, he offered his fingerprinting
system to Scotland Yard. They weren t interested.
Neither were other police forces. Two years later, Galton...
remember the guy to whom Darwin had passed on our boy s letter six years before.
The boy who didn t do anything with it? Well, that guy wrote a paper
for the Royal Institution. Coincidentally it s about just the stuff that
Jock Mc Jock Jock was talking about six years earlier...
but I used the extensive data produced by Sir William Herschel.
The Jock mentioned it in the letter he sent you say?
Well I ll be... NOW fingerprinting was
considered by an 1894 Parliamentary committee and it was put into use in the courts in 1895.
In 1901 a former colleague of Galton, the Commissioner of Police at Scotland
Yard, called Edward Henry, set up a fingerprint bureau.
Sir William Herchel, Frances Galton and Edward Henry
were credited with developing fingerprinting. This led to and already simmering
row with Henry Faulds heating up to boiling point.
In the years that followed Faulds published books and papers trying
to vindicate his position and his precedence. His better-connected adversaries later accepted
that he had been the first to postulate fingerprinting in the solution of crime,
but they said that he hadn t provided sufficient data.
It s like a teacher saying you don t get marks for the correct answer unless you show your working.
As he grew older the conviction that he d been cheated ate away at him.
When Galton was elevated to a Knight of the Realm
Faulds wrote to the Home Secretary Winston Churchill, to ask for his.
When he was refused, he had his MP put questions to Churchill in the House.
He lived out an embittered life as a police surgeon in London,
and then in the Stoke-on-Trent. In 1930 unable to practice
medicine due to infirmity, he died in diminished financial circumstances.
He d come up with an insightful solution that we take for granted today.
He was the first to publish, but somebody stole his thunder...
The thing is, thieves don t leave
fingerprints on thunder. But we remember him...
and the people of Beith do too, because on 12 November 2004
this memorial was dedicated to his memory here in Beith,
just round the corner from New Street where he was born.
I promised you a video about the Scotsman who was the real Sherlock
Holmes... and it s coming up on screen. Click top right to support the channel
by becoming a Patreon member or buy me a coffee in the description below.