History of Fingerprint Pattern Recognition

This article summarizes the major developments in the history of efforts to use fingerprint patterns to identify individuals, from the earliest fingerprint classification systems of Vucetich and Henry in the 1890s through the advent of automated fingerprint identification. By chronicling the history of “manual” systems for recording storing, matching, and retrieving fingerprints, the article puts advances in automatic fingerprint recognition in historical context and highlights their historical and social significance.