In 1823 Jan Evangelista Purkyně identified nine fingerprint patterns. The nine patterns include the tented arch, the loop, and the whorl, which in modern-day forensics are considered ridge details.[45] In 1840, following the murder of Lord William Russell, a provincial doctor, Robert Blake Overton, wrote to Scotland Yard suggesting checking for fingerprints.[46] In 1853 the German anatomist Georg von Meissner (1829–1905) studied friction ridges,[47] and in 1858 Sir William James Herschel initiated fingerprinting in India. In 1877 he first instituted the use of fingerprints on contracts and deeds to prevent the repudiation of signatures in Hooghly near Kolkata[48] and he registered government pensioners' fingerprints to prevent the collection of money by relatives after a pensioner's death.[49]
In 1880 Henry Faulds, a Scottish surgeon in a Tokyo hospital, published his first paper on the usefulness of fingerprints for identification and proposed a method to record them with printing ink.[50] Returning to Great Britain in 1886, he offered the concept to the Metropolitan Police in London but it was dismissed at that time.[51] Up until the early 1890s police forces in the United States and on the European continent could not reliably identify criminals to track their criminal record.[52] Francis Galton published a detailed statistical model of fingerprint analysis and identification in his 1892 book Finger Prints. He had calculated that the chance of a "false positive" (two different individuals having the same fingerprints) was about 1 in 64 billion.[53] In 1892 Juan Vucetich, an Argentine chief police officer, created the first method of recording the fingerprints of individuals on file. In that same year, Francisca Rojas was found in a house with neck injuries, whilst her two sons were found dead with their throats cut. Rojas accused a neighbour, but despite brutal interrogation, this neighbour would not confess to the crimes. Inspector Alvarez, a colleague of Vucetich, went to the scene and found a bloody thumb mark on a door. When it was compared with Rojas' prints, it was found to be identical with her right thumb. She then confessed to the murder of her sons.[54] This was the first known murder case to be solved using fingerprint analysis.[55]
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