Fingerprints: Murder and the Race to Uncover the Science of Identity. Colin Beavan
and pointed out to Konai the distinctive differences between the two. You may think you can deny your handwriting, Herschel communicated to Konai, but you’ll never be able to deny that this outline of a hand and these lines of the palm belong to you and no one else. The scheme worked. Konai delivered the road-making materials as promised.
Herschel, impressed with his newfound ability to frighten someone into honoring a contract, experimented with handprints until he eventually hit upon printing just the fingertips, which was less messy. The Chinese and Japanese, probably the first to make widespread use of fingerprints as signatures, had used them on contracts as early as 600 A.D. Herschel, several authorities have written, likely borrowed the idea from a colony of Chinese living in Calcutta, though Herschel always insisted that the fingerprint conception had come in a sudden flash of his own inspiration.
In 1859, Herschel began collecting, as keepsakes, the fingerprints of his friends, colleagues, and family. Each impression, Herschel noted, was different, convincing him, over time, that fingerprints were unique to each individual. His notebooks included fingerprints taken from the tiny fingers of babies, from Indian nobility, and from old college friends, all dated and labeled by name the way some people collect autographs. He even took the inked impression of a dog’s nose: “a little white and black terrier at 2 months.” (Much later in history, the inked imprints of the skin patterns on the noses of cattle and horses would also be found to be individual and used to identify them as a safeguard against theft.)
In 1860, Herschel came up with another application for his fingerprint idea. In Nuddea, near Calcutta, where Herschel took a position as magistrate, the landowners had been turfing the tenant farmers off the land for non-payment of rent. The farmers, who cultivated indigo, the primary ingredient of blue dye at the time, couldn’t pay because the landowners had not discounted rents in line with an indigo market decline. Disputes between tenants and farmers erupted at first into riots and later into the courtrooms of magistrates like Herschel.
Tenants, desperately clinging to their land, insisted that landlords tried to collect much higher rents than they’d agreed on in their leases. They presented the supposed documents as evidence, but many of them turned out to be forgeries, made particularly hard to detect because they were impressed with replicas of the landlords’ seals. Herschel, frustrated by the flow of worthless paper through his courtroom, concluded that landlords should throw out their seals and instead authenticate leases with fingerprints. He set out to develop his fingerprint signature idea for widespread use.
He concerned himself first with insuring that fingerprints could not be forged like the landlords’ seals. He commissioned artists around Calcutta to copy his fingerprint, but none made even a close facsimile. In anticipation of the businessmen’s objections to the messy application of ink to their fingers, he wrote in 1862 to his much more practical brother-in-law, Alexander Hardcastle, and asked him to “devise an utterly simple device for inking the finger.”
Finally, in 1863, when the non-payment of rent had reached crisis point and land and lease litigation choked the courts, Herschel penned an official letter to his superiors suggesting his system for prevention of lease forgery. The first two fingers of both the landlord and the tenant should be impressed on each lease, he wrote, so that neither could alter it or disavow it in the future. Government higher-ups rejected Herschel’s idea, feeling that it might cause ill feeling just at the time when the indigo disturbances were quieting down. Herschel bided his time.
Fourteen years passed before a more senior Herschel, now magistrate of Hooghly, near Calcutta, was finally able to institute fingerprinting under his own authority. He introduced the system in three separate departments. For a year-long period, between 1877 to 1878, government pensioners in his region signed for their monthly payments with fingerprints. At the registry of deeds, land owners impressed fingerprints to authenticate their transactions. At the courthouse, convicts were forced to fingerprint their jail warrants so hired substitutes could not take their place at the prison. One year before he retired and moved back to England, nearly twenty years after he first came up with the idea, Herschel had finally put fingerprints to official use.
Herschel had, with a little help from the Chinese, conceived the use of fingerprints to irrefutably identify documents with their signatories. But he did not realize until much later, when it was pointed out to him, that fingerprints could be used to identify unknown criminals. Nor had he developed the fingerprint concept sufficiently to be used for that purpose.
Nowhere in his writings, for example, did Herschel mention any large-scale experiments to determine for certain that no two fingerprints were alike. Nor did he discuss what features of two fingerprints should be compared to determine if they had come from the same or different fingers. In fact, the fingerprints in the record books from the Hooghly Registry of Deeds, made in runny, water-based ink, were so faint and smeared that they were often indistinguishable. Even if Herschel understood the technical nuances of fingerprinting, it is clear that his subordinates did not. Under Herschel, fingerprints were more effectively used as a means of intimidation than for any real scientific purpose.
In his 1917 memoir, Herschel would nevertheless claim sole credit for conceiving the fingerprint method of criminal identification, even denying the contributions of the Chinese. As supposed documentary evidence, he produced what was to be known as the “Hooghly Letter,” written by him in August 1877 to Bengal’s Inspector of Jails and Registrar-General. In it, he suggested the widespread expansion of the two-digit fingerprint signatures he used in Hooghly to jailers’ warrants and deed registries throughout Bengal. His suggestion was rejected. More importantly, his letter suggested neither the use of fingerprints to identify unknown criminals in police custody nor their use as crime-scene evidence. Herschel’s letter did not suggest the fingerprint system as it is used today.
In 1878, when Herschel returned to England permanently, his successor in Hooghly did not see the value in Herschel’s fingerprint registration, and discontinued it. After only one year, Herschel’s system fell into disuse. It had not proved itself to anyone but Herschel himself. So, though it was already being quietly investigated by the obscure Scottish medical missionary Henry Faulds in Japan, fingerprinting again fell temporarily into obscurity. This time it did so right when jailers, police, and criminologists needed a system of identification more than ever before.
“… Lawrence Earl Ferrers, Viscount Tamworth, shall be hanged by the neck until he is dead and … his body will be dissected and anatomized,” said a writ of execution read out in the House of Lords in May 1760. When Earl Ferrers’s wife left him because of his bouts of drunken violence, a man named Johnson got the job of collecting her maintenance payments. The earl grew to hate Johnson and his monthly visits, and eventually shot him dead. It was for this that Ferrers was tried and condemned by the House of Lords.
At the appointed hour, the noose descended over the earl’s head, the gallows trap door swung open under his feet, and he fell until the rope jerked him to a sudden stop. His neck broke with a sickening crack. After his body hung limp and lifeless for the customary hour, undertakers carted it to Surgeon’s Hall in the City of London for dissection. Surgeons slit open the abdomen and removed his bowels. They sliced two strips of flesh from his chest and drew them open like curtains to reveal his bloody organs. His eviscerated body, then displayed in a public gallery as a warning against would-be murderers, became a cheap, gory sideshow for the public to parade past. Earl Ferrers’s memory suffered its final insult.
The gutting, a fate reserved especially for murderers in eighteenth-century Britain, numbered just one among the many ruthless provisions of the period’s criminal law, known as the “Bloody Code.” For over 200 different crimes, the Code prescribed death as easily as today’s law might call for community service. Begging, if you were a soldier or sailor, could earn you a stretch of the neck, and so could spending more than a month with gypsies. Between 1805 and 1818, a fifth of those who mounted the gallows’ steps under the Code had done nothing worse than forge bank notes.
Continental society was just as cruel to its criminals. Three years before Earl Ferrers’s gutting, France sentenced Robert-François Damiens to be burned and cut to pieces for trying to stab Louis XV. Each time red-hot pincers tore off a piece of Damiens’s flesh and opened a new wound, molten lead was poured in to stanch the flow of blood. Letting