Henry Faulds Information & Henry Faulds Links at HealthHaven.com

Dr Henry Faulds (1 June 1843 – 19 March 1930) was a Scottish scientist who is noted for the development of fingerprinting.

[edit] Early life

Faulds was born in the Scottish town of Beith, North Ayrshire into a family of modest means. Aged 13, he was forced to leave school, and went to Glasgow to work as a clerk to help support his family; at 21 he decided to enroll at the Facility of Arts at Glasgow University, where he studied mathematics, logic and the classics. He later studied medicine at Anderson's College, and graduated with a physician’s licence.

Following graduation, Faulds then became a medical missionary for the Church of Scotland. In 1871, he was sent to British India, where he worked for two years in Darjeeling at a hospital for the poor.

On 23 July 1873, he received a letter of appointment from the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland to establish a medical mission in Japan. He married Isabella Wilson that September, and the newlyweds departed for Japan in December.

[edit] Life in Japan

Whilst accompanying a friend (American archeologist, Edward S. Morse) to an archaeological dig he noticed how the delicate impressions left by craftsmen could be discerned in ancient clay fragments. Examining his own fingertips and those of friends, he became convinced that the pattern of ridges was unique to each individual.

Shortly after these observations his hospital was broken into. The local police arrested a member of staff whom Faulds believed to be innocent. Determined to exonerate the man, he compared the fingerprints left behind at the crime scene to those of the suspect and found them to be different. On the strength of this evidence the police agreed to release the suspect.

In an attempt to promote the idea of fingerprint identification he sought the help of the noted naturalist Charles Darwin. Darwin declined to work on the idea, but passed it on to his relative Francis Galton, who forwarded it to the Anthropological Society of London. When Galton returned to the topic some eight years later, he paid little attention to Faulds' letter. As a result of this interchange some controversy has arisen about the inventor of modern forensic fingerprinting.

The following month Sir William Herschel, a British civil servant based in India, wrote to Nature saying that he had been using fingerprints (as a form of bar code) to identify criminals since 1860. However, Herschel did not mention their potential for forensic use.He removed his own prints with chemicals and discovered that they grew back in the same pattern.

He amassed a collection of fingerprints, but a breakthrough came when Tokyo police arrested a man for burglary.

Dr Faulds proved that the suspect could not have been the thief.

When the police subsequently arrested another suspect, Dr Faulds established that it was the second suspect's fingerprints that had been left at the scene of the crime.

We are very pleased that at long last this memorial to Dr Henry Faulds is finally a reality Donald Reid Local historian In 1880, Dr Faulds published his research in Nature Magazine, an article in which he predicted the forensic application of fingerprints and even forecasted that fingerprints would one day be transmitted by photo-telegraphy.

But when Dr Faulds appealed to the aging Charles Darwin for help in promoting research, Darwin passed the findings to his nephew, Sir Francis Galton.

Sir Francis Galton and his colleague, Sir Edward Henry, would later claim these findings as their own, quietly forgetting to credit Dr Faulds' pioneering work.

A memorial to Dr Faulds has stood in Tokyo since 1951, but campaigners in his home town of Beith have long pressed for something similar to be put in place in Scotland.

A plaque to the doctor was unveiled on Friday by Provost Drew Duncan of North Ayrshire Council and Brian Wilson, MP for Cunninghame North.

[edit] Return to Britain

Returning to Britain in 1886, after a quarrel with the missionary society which ran his hospital in Japan, Faulds offered the concept of fingerprint identification to Scotland Yard but he was dismissed, most likely because he did not present the extensive evidence required to show that prints are durable, unique and practically classifiable. He published an article in Nature in 1880, in which he explained the suitability of fingerprinting for the identification of criminals. Faulds also wrote to Charles Darwin, who forwared Faulds' letter to Francis Galton. The letter, unfortunately, was never published. Subsequently, Faulds returned to the life of a police surgeon, at first in London, and then in the Stoke-on-Trent town of Fenton. In 1922 he sold his practice and moved to nearby Wolstanton where he died in March 1930 aged 86, bitter at the lack of recognition he had received for his work.However, in 2007 a plaque acknowledging Faulds' work has been put in place at the head offices of Castle Comfort Stairlifts near to Wolstanton's St Margaret's churchyard where his grave can be seen.

[edit] Legacy

As a purely practical matter, Faulds had no direct effect on the development of finger printing and its adoption by criminal justice systems internationally. None of his publications contain any substantial data of his own about the actual occurrence and characteristics of fingerprint patterns. He does deserve credit, however, for being an early investigator and advocate of the broad notion of using fingerprints forensically, even if he never grasped the form this took practically.

The Japanese police officially adopted the fingerprinting system in 1911.

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links