The first attempt by Europeans to make use of the characteristic ridges of the fingers to record the identity of individuals appears to have been that of Sir William Herschel, who introduced a method officially into Bengal.
His system arose out of the difficulty of checking forgeries by the natives in India, and his having made two of them record their finger impressions upon contracts, so that he might be able to frighten them should they subsequently deny their signatures.
This was in 1858, and the device proved so unexpectedly successful that for several years Sir William Herschel made a study of the use of finger-prints in identification, and finally found them so satisfactory that, in 1877, he gave instructions for their systematic use in the Hooghly.
A description of the advantages that were thereby reaped is given in Nature (1880, Vol. XXIII, 23). The frequent attempts previously made by the natives to deny their own signatures were completely frustrated, and documents thus stamped with a finger-print could not afterwards be disputed.
The use of finger-prints was also invaluable as a means of preventing the fraudulent claims of pensions by persons who were not entitled to them.
Then as the system was found to work so well in these cases it was introduced into the prisons, each new-comer being made to sign the register with the finger. The official visitors had thus the means of satisfying themselves as to the identity of each inmate of the prison.
Although Sir William Herschel tried to obtain permission to extend the use of the finger-print identification still further, his attempts did not meet with success.
About the same time that Sir William Herschel published the account of his system a suggestion was made to register the Chinese in California by a similar process, but nothing was done in the matter.
There have also been occasional applications of the method to prevent forgery, as, for instance, in 1882 in the payment orders signed by Mr. Thomson of the American Geological Survey, upon which, as a safeguard, he made the imprint of his own finger.
It is to Sir William Herschel, however, that the credit is due of having established the first modern systematic process of registration of individuals by means of finger impressions.