The distinctive nature of fingerprints has been known for centuries. The ancient Babylonians used fingerprint impressions to record business transactions and fingerprints were used on Chinese documents more than a thousand years ago. The scientific use of fingerprints to solve crime, however, started little more than a hundred years ago.
1858 Sir William Herschel, a British Administrator in Bengal, makes the first practical application of fingerprints for personal identification when he requires Indians to place their fingerprints as well as their signatures on contracts.
1880 Dr Henry Faulds, a doctor working in Tokyo, looks at the possibility of fingerprint science identifying criminals by the fingerprints left at the crime scene using printer's ink.
1892 Juan Vucetich, a police officer in Argentina, makes the first fingerprint identification from a crime scene, and opens the first fingerprint bureau in the world.
1892 English scientist Sir Francis Galton publishes an accurate and in-depth study of the fingerprint science, including an attempt at a system of fingerprint classification for large collections of fingerprints.
1897 Sir Edward Henry, Inspector General of Police in Bengal and later Commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police, with the assistance of two Bengali Police Officers, devises a simplified fingerprint classification system for police use and introduces it in India. The Henry system is the basis of most fingerprint systems in the English-speaking world.
1901 The Fingerprint Bureau is formed at New Scotland Yard.
1902 In Australia, Sam McCauley begins fingerprinting in NSW prisons and establishes a Fingerprint Bureau at Darlinghurst Gaol.
1903 NSW establishes the first State fingerprint bureau, followed by Victoria (1903), Queensland and South Australia (1904), Tasmania (1912), Western Australia (1928), the Northern Territory (1957) and the ACT (1967). In 1980 the Australian Federal Police incorporate the ACT fingerprint bureau.
1941 The NSW Fingerprint Bureau becomes the Central Fingerprint Bureau of Australia, a jointly-funded national fingerprint support service.
1957 The chemical Ninhydrin is used for the first time to develop fingerprints left on paper.
1986 The Central Fingerprint Bureau of Australia is replaced by the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System (NAFIS), a computerised national database based on scanning original ink fingerprints.
2001 An enhanced National Automated Fingerprint Identification System is established. The system commences operations with 2.4 million 'ten print' records, covering 24 million individual fingerprints and 4.8 million palm prints, and 180,000 latent prints from unsolved crime scenes.
2009 Introduction of handheld, portable identification devices to allow police on the street to capture and process fingerprints taken from suspects they have arrested.
2010 Major upgrade to the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System to offer improved searching accuracy and greater end user functionality.