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Whorl
Loop
In China, there is a folklore that meant that certain fingerprint patterns were linked to different destinies!
Here are some examples: -
One whorl indicates poverty
Two whorls indicate riches
Three and four whorls suggest you open a pawnshop
Five whorls for a mediator
Six whorls for a thief
Seven whorls is very bad and indicates catastrophes in life
Eight whorls and you will eat chaff
Nine whorls with a loop – you will be rich doing no work but eating well until your old age.
As we go through life and touch many different surfaces we leave fingerprints. Our fingerprint patterns are left behind in traces of sweat and oil from our skin.
In 1892, Sir Francis Galton (Charles Darwin’s cousin) published a book including the first fingerprint classification system. Many ideas came from the work of Henry Faulds who had worked out the importance of fingerprints but didn’t have the social standing to publish a book so wrote to Sir Francis Galton for help. Galton used the material himself!
Since then fingerprints have become a vital tool to the forensic investigator and has been used around the world to convict criminals.
They are a number of ways to collect the patterns left by fingerprints with techniques improving all the time.
The traditional method of collecting fingerprints usually only works on glass and paintwork. It is ‘powder processing’ which is when you brush the area with a powder. The tiny particles of powder soon stick to the lines of the fingerprint. The fingerprint is then lifted with sticky tape and put onto paper. It is then photographed and made bigger so that you can see the detail better.
Modern processes means you can get fingerprint details on a wider range of surfaces. Exposing fingerprints to iodine fumes turns the fingerprints purple. Then using superglue clumps and sticks inside the details of the fingerprint. When this sets in seconds it gives a clear detail of the fingerprint.
Special lights and fluorescent dyes have made it possible to collect fingerprints from almost any surface even from objects that have been underwater.
Once the fingerprints were collected, identifying them used to be very time consuming. Collected fingerprints from a crime scene have to be compared with fingerprints taken from the suspects, known criminals and innocent people from the area. Now we have a computer database with fingerprints from known criminals from all over the UK. This makes it a much easier and quicker process. This database is called NAFIS, which stands for National Automated Fingerprint Identification System. It can compare fingerprints taken from a crime scene to its database at a rate of 1 million per second! There have to be 13 matching points for a match to be certain.
Unfortunately now that criminals are aware of fingerprint evidence they are becoming more careful not to leave them behind at the crime scene and use gloves.
The first recorded use of fingerprints as evidence to convict a criminal was in 1892 by the Argentinean police officer Juan Vucetich. In a shack near Buenos Aires two children who lived with their mother where murdered. The mother was slightly injured and she gave the police the name Velasquez as the culprit. However a bloody fingerprint was found and this was identified as the mothers. She had killed her own sons. She later admitted it saying that her lover would have married her if she hadn’t had children.
Did you know that the pattern on dog’s noses is as unique to dogs as fingerprints are to people? The Canadian Kennel Club has used dog nose prints for identity since 1938.
So this begs the question that if a blind man commits a crime and if the nose print of his guide dog is found at the scene of the crime, would this be enough evidence to convict him?
