Faulds was born on June 1st, 1843 in Beith, a little town in southwest Scotland.
13 years old, Henry Faulds quit school and went to work for his Uncle to help support his family.
Henry enlisted in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Glasgow.
Faulds graduated and enrolled at Anderson's College, Glasgow and began his study of medicine. Faulds earned his physician's licentiate. In addition to his full-time work as a doctor, Faulds wrote two books on travel in the Far East, three others on fingerprinting, and many academic articles, and found three magazines.
Faulds sailed to Darjeeling, India to work as a medical missionary with the Church of Scotland. For two years, he treated and cared for the poor in Darjeeling.
On July 29, 1873 Faulds received his letter of appointment from the Presbyterian Church. In September he married Isabella Wilson. In December, the newlyweds sailed from London to establish the first Scottish Medical Mission in Japan.
Faulds ran his hospital, lectured Japanese medical students, taught Dr. Joseph Lister's antiseptic methods to Japanese surgeons, trekked into the mountains to heal the bedridden, established a society for the blind, and set up lifeguard stations to prevent drowning in nearby canals. He halted a rabies epidemic that killed small children who played with infected mice, and he helped stop the spread of cholera into Japan. He even cured a plague infecting the local fishmonger's stock of carp. By 1882, his hospital treated 15,000 patients annually. Faulds was inundated.
Faulds and an American archeologist, Edward S. Morse struck up a friendship. Morse had traveled to Japan to study brachiopods, a type of shellfish common in its coastal waters. But within days of his arrival, he was sidetracked by his discovery of an ancient mound of discarded shells and bones, where long-dead villagers had piled their refuse. The shell mounds were the last remnants of "savage races," as Morse called them, who visited the shore to feast on mollusks and fishes.
At the time, academics searched frantically for empirical evidence of man's evolution. Shell mounds helped provide that evidence. In Florida, researchers digging such ancient garbage dumps discovered charred pieces of human bone that appeared to have been cooked---proof, they concluded, of cannibalism. More commonly, shell mounds yielded gouges and needles made from bone and hammers, axes and arrows made from stone. Morse's Japanese excavations were distinguished by cooking pots and other vessels made from clay.
Eighty-nine meters long and four meters deep, Morse's shell mounds lay alongside the Imperial Railway Line, just before Omari station, about six miles outside Tokyo and half a mile from the shoreline. The water level had dropped dramatically since the ancients had gone to Omari to rummage for seafood. The bottom layers of the shell mound, Morse estimated from the receded waterline, were at least 2,000 years old. Morse's workers carefully sorted through the mounds and carried away basketsful of artifacts. Henry Faulds regularly rode the train to Omari to sift through the booty. He was entranced.
One day, while turning over ancient pottery fragments in his hands, Faulds noticed minute patterns of parallel lines impressed in the clay. He examined them closely, trying to discern their source. Some months earlier, Faulds had lectured his medical lecture on touch, he had noticed the swirling ridges on his own fingertips. In a flash, he realized that the 2,000-year-old impressions he now examined in clay came from the ridges on the fingers of ancient potters.
Did modern potters leave such marks, too? Faulds scoured the contemporary markets of Tokyo, closely examining the surfaces of current-day pottery. The marks were everywhere. On China tea sets in one market stall he noticed how "one peculiar pattern of lineations would reappear with great persistency, as if the same artist had left her sign-mark on her work." Suddenly it occurred to him that a piece of pottery could be matched to a particular potter by the ridge markings left in the clay. He had begun to suspect that finger-ridge patterns were unique to each individual, the basis for their use in identification. At first, Faulds paid little attention to this detail
The Scottish doctor studied the fingerprints of his friends, his family, his grocers, even the workmen who came to his house. At first, Faulds examined their finger ridges directly, making sketches for his records. Next, he began recording their fingertips in wax. Finally, he hit on the technique of inking the fingertips and recording their impressions on paper. Twenty years earlier, William Herschel, unknown to Faulds, had begun collecting the prints of the thumb and first two fingers of his acquaintances. Now, Faulds began a similar practice, except for one crucial difference-he insisted on inking and printing all ten of his subjects' fingers, a move that would one day make fingerprint sets easier to differentiate in large criminal registers.
Faulds's collection of prints swelled to the thousands, but they all came from European and Japanese fingers. He needed a greater variety to determine whether finger-ridge patterns differed from race to race and area to area as he had postulated. In an effort to expand his data, he wrote more than a hundred letters to scientists around the world, asking their assistance in collecting fingerprints and including copies of specially created ten-digit fingerprint forms. Faulds received almost no response. "Some thought I was an advocate of palmistrymost took no notice whatever." Faulds's fingerprint studies had come to a dead end.
Coincidentally, during this period, the supply of medical alcohol at Faulds's hospital, kept in a bottle in a locked cabinet, ran inexplicably low. It had to be restocked again and again before Faulds finally realized that the bottle was emptying itself into some thirsty person's gullet. When he found a makeshift cocktail glass in the form of a laboratory measuring beaker, he examined its surface and discovered a nearly complete set of sweaty finger marks. Faulds searched his collection of fingerprint cards for a match, and found one. It belonged to one of his medical students---culprit discovered.
At first, Faulds did not recognize the new use of fingerprints he had unwittingly stumbled upon. Then, a month later, someone attempted to burgle the hospital by climbing up a wall and through a window. Local police accused a favorite member of Faulds's staff, but the ridge patterns in a sooty handprint found on the wall, Faulds found, did not match those of the accused. He showed his evidence to the police and exonerated the staff member.
This time Faulds saw the lighta fingerprint register of habitual criminals would foil their attempts to use false names and get lighter sentences. Faulds's conception was similar, in a way, to that of William Herschel, who, unknown to Faulds, had one year earlier introduced fingerprints' official use in Hooghly, India. Herschel, however, used fingerprints only as a form of signature to authenticate documents. Faulds's idea had much farther-reaching ramifications. He realized fingerprints could solve the problem of identification that so troubled the British legal system.
Faulds was loath at first to publish his idea. He was plagued by a "most depressing sense of moral responsibility and danger. What if someone were wrongly identified and made to suffer innocently through a defective method? It seemed to me that a great deal had to be done before publicly proposing the adoption of such a scheme." Faulds first set out to prove conclusively that fingerprints were unique to each individual and, second, that they stayed the same throughout the person's life.
In one experiment, Faulds and his medical students shaved off their finger ridges with razors until no pattern could be traced. The ridges grew back, without exception, in exactly the same patterns. They repeated the experiment, removing the ridges by any number of methods---by "pumice-stone, sand paper, emery dust, various acids, caustics and even Spanish fly"---and each time the results were the same.
Next, Faulds studied infants to see if growth affected their fingertip patterns the way it dramatically changed the rest of their bodies. It didn't. Over a period of two years, he also examined the hands of large numbers of Japanese children and some thirty-five European children between the ages of five and ten. In no case did the ridge patterns vary. When an epidemic of scarlet fever swept through Japan, causing severe peeling of the skin, Faulds again studied the fingerprints and found no before-and-after change.
"Enough had been observed," Faulds decided, "to enable me confidently, as a practical biologist, to assert the invariableness, for practical identification purposes, of the patterns formed by the lineations of human finger-tips." Fingerprints were permanent. Meanwhile, the many thousands of fingerprint sets collected and mutually compared by Faulds satisfied him that each person's fingerprint set was truly unique. He was finally ready to go public.
Faulds's first concern was still to spread the study of fingerprints among ethnologists and anthropologists around the world. To this end, he hoped to enlist the aid of his hero Charles Darwin. "I am an ardent student of your writings," he wrote in a letter dated February 1880. "I trust I may venture to address you on a subject of interest. I allude to the rugae and furrows on the palmar surface of the hand." He explained the purpose of his comparative study of fingerprints, but complained that he was short of samples from around the world. He hoped a word or two from Darwin might set researchers working everywhere.
Darwin, by 1880, was too old to help. He wrote a letter of apology to Faulds, and promised to send Faulds's letter to his cousin, Francis Galton, an esteemed scientist who was interested in using Darwin's theories to improve the human race. In April 1880, true to his word, Darwin wrote: "My dear Galton, The enclosed letter may perhaps interest you, as it relates to a queer subject. You will perhaps say hang his impudence. I have written Faulds telling him I could give no help, but have forwarded the letter to you on the chance of its interesting you."
Galton replied, saying that "I myself got several thumb impressions a couple of years ago but failed, perhaps from want of sufficiently minute observation, to make any large number of differences. I will do what I can to help Faulds in getting the sort of facts in having an extract from his letter printed." Galton did not keep his word; Faulds never heard from him.
The doctor was not deterred. Eight months after writing to Darwin, he published his fingerprint ideas and pleas for further investigation in the pages of the prestigious scientific journal Nature. In his letter in the October 28, 1880, edition, Faulds suggested the use of "bloody finger-marks or impressions on clay, glass, etc." for the "scientific identification of criminals." He also suggested that registers be kept of "the for-ever-unchangeable finger-furrows of important criminals."
Faulds's letter was the first in the scientific literature to suggest the basic concepts of the fingerprint system of identification as we know it today. Much to Faulds's disappointment, it did not spark great scientific discourse. Scientists did not, as Faulds had hoped, fill his mailbox with samples from around the world. Police chiefs did not race to institute his ideas in their departments. In fact, the only notable response was a reply from William Herschel, published about a month later on November 25, 1880, also in Nature. Now back in England, Herschel reported his limited use of fingerprints two years earlier in India as a method of signature. Herschel's account of his bureaucratic application of fingerprints did little to further kindle any widespread interest in Faulds's ideas.
In his frustration, Faulds took it upon himself to write to the chiefs of the major police forces around the world. Patiently, he dispatched letters to New York, London, Paris, among others. His campaign was a lonely one, rarely instigating even the courtesy of a reply. To make matters worse, a second system of scientific criminal identification had been developed by a young clerk named Alphonse Bertillon in Paris. Without knowing it, Faulds ran in a race with Bertillon to see who could be the first to convince a police chief to experiment with his system. Whoever won would from then on be considered the father of scientific identification.
