The most common form of biometric security used by many businesses today comes in the form of fingerprint access control, often used to manage access doors, safes and other areas of vital security.
Whilst fingerprint technology is so common today it has been available on mobile phones since 2004, this only became the case thanks to a century-long evolution of fingerprint identification and codification.
Whilst there are a lot of pioneers in dactyloscopy, possibly the first person to put it into practice was Juan Vucetich Kovacevich, an Argentine born in Hvar, then part of the Austrian Empire (now in Croatia).
Fingerprint identification was at the time a rapidly developing field. Whilst it was initially used in criminal investigations by accident by Sir William Herschel, it was the works of Henry Faulds, Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose that advanced the field of criminology.
Mr Kovacevich was inspired by the work of Francis Galton, in particular, and used his system as a base for developing an expanded, practical utilisation of fingerprints in investigations. He was also the first to truly put it into practice.
The Case Of Francisca Rojas
On 29th June 1892, Francisca Rojas, 27, brutally murdered her six-year-old son and four-year-old daughter, before cutting her own throat to make it look like she was also the victim of an attack.
The police had no leads, and the initial suspect, neighbour and former boyfriend Pedro Velasquez, had an alibi. However, when Police Inspector Alverez investigated the days-old crime scene, he noticed a mark on the bedroom door that turned out to be a bloody fingerprint.
He put his training from Mr Vucetich into practice and took the sample to be analysed. Once it was compared to a fresh print from Ms Rojas, it was found to be a match and she confessed to the murders.
The motive, it turned out, was that a boyfriend had said he would marry her were it not for the fact she had children, described by said boyfriend as “those two brats”. She would ultimately be sentenced to life in prison.
The Rojas case became incredibly influential in the field of criminology and by extension the fields of biometrics and later biometric security.
The uniqueness of fingerprints had been known for thousands of years and was first examined as early as 1788 through the works of Johann Christoph Andreas Mayer.
However, the legwork of Inspector Alvarez and the training and method developed by Mr
Vucetich created definitive proof of its effectiveness, and as early as 1897, a fingerprint bureau and classification system was established by Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose, although it was named after Sir Edward Henry, their boss.
Ultimately, Mr Vucetich developed an internationally recognised system and advocated strongly, albeit controversially, for the establishment of a universal database of fingerprints to protect innocent people.
It was controversial for various civil liberties reasons and ultimately a 1916 attempt to fingerprint everyone in Argentina was overturned following civil unrest.
However, the importance he placed on it was ultimately proven. Argentina became the first country in the world to only use fingerprints for identification rather than various debunked anthropological identification systems.
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