Silent Witnesses by Nigel McCrery Read Free Book Online

the story that—before the anarchist movement had become disenchanted with Ravachol—a fellow anarchist had shown support by bombing the restaurant where he had been arrested, murdering the proprietor and a customer.
    As a result of the crucial part his methods played in the case, Bertillon was now a household name in France, the “Sherlock Holmes” of Paris. Indeed, he is referenced in the Sherlock Holmes story
The Hound of the Baskervilles
—a client refers to Holmes as the “second highest expert in Europe” after Bertillon. He crops up again in “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty,” where we are told that Holmes himself “expressed his enthusiastic admiration of the French savant.” There is no doubt that a great many cases that would otherwise not have been solved owe their successful conclusion toBertillon’s system of measurement. However, things were changing and a new system would soon come to take center stage.
    People have been aware of the patterns we all have on the tips of our fingers for thousands of years. Examples of fingerprints have been found on the walls of Egyptian tombs and as decorative motifs on ancient pottery from various cultures. Perhaps more surprisingly, it seems that there was a crude sense that fingerprints were in some way representative of a person’s individuality; in ancient Babylon in the second millennium BC, fingerprints were sometimes used in order to seal a legal contract. Later, in China around AD 300, handprints were used as evidence in a trial for theft, while in AD 650, Kia Kung-Yen, a Chinese historian, remarked upon the fact that fingerprints could be used as a form of authentication.
    But while this consensus that fingerprints had a certain uniqueness about them persisted, it was many hundreds of years before this would be scientifically described or studied.
    In 1684 the renowned English botanist Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712) published a paper describing the ridge structure on the skin covering a person’s fingers and palm. Almost a century later the German anatomist Johann Mayer (1747–1801) stated for the first time outright that no two prints were exactly alike, that in fact all were completely unique. This was obviously of enormous theoretical importance for forensic science, though it would be a little while longer until such knowledge was put to practical use. It was the British civil servant Sir William Herschel (1833–1917) who seems to have been the first to use fingerprinting in a really formalized system (see Plate 3 ). He used fingerprints when paying pensions to Bengalisoldiers to stop impostors from being able to collect money. Each of the soldiers had to register their fingerprints on their pay books and also provide fingerprints when collecting their pension. Any impostor would quickly be revealed when his prints did not match up with those in the pay book. This system apparently worked extremely well, but the Bengali inspector general of prisons nonetheless rejected Herschel’s idea of creating a larger system of fingerprint classification and analysis. Herschel returned to England in 1879.
    At about the same time, a Scottish surgeon, Dr. Henry Faulds (1843–1930), was working in Japan, teaching physiology to medical students at the Tsukiji Hospital in Tokyo. During his time there he happened to notice the marks of fingerprints visible on some Japanese pottery. He became interested in the various differences between them and began to study the distinctive “whorls” on the fingerprints (also known as papillary lines). Several years later, this purely academic work was to have a very worthwhile application. In 1879, while investigating a burglary in Tokyo, the Japanese police recovered a set of grubby fingerprints on a whitewashed wall. A man was later arrested on suspicion of the crime but vehemently protested his innocence. The police had heard of Faulds and his interest in