Timeline
For those questions about when something happened in the 1800s.
Scientific developments.Forensics and their earliest uses.Law enforcement.Judicial system, punishment, and defendant’s rights.
1801: John Hayes appointed High Constable for New York; he single-handedly ran the city’s small police force for 50 years.
1805: Bow Street Horse Patrol re-introduced following Patrick Colquhoun’s campaign.
1806: Valentin Rose (the Younger) uses nitric acid, potassium carbonate, and lime to detect arsenic in human tissue.
1809: Anna Margaretha Zwanziger arrested and convicted of multiple murders through arsenic poisoning. Arsenic was detected in three exhumed corpses using Valentin Rose’s method. She confessed and was executed by beheading in 1810.
1813: Bow Street Runner Samuel Taunton and Principal Officer Harry Adkins carry out the world’s first documented ballistics forensic examination. Matched the pistol lead shot recovered from the victim to a bullet mold found near the scene which proved it had been fired from a pistol found in the suspect’s possession.
1814: Mathieu Orfila (Spain) published the first treatise on poisons and their detection entitled, Treatise on Poisons, and became the father of modern toxicology.
1816: Dr. George Male (England) published treatise, Epitome of Forensic Medicine. It outlined procedures for inspecting bodies, scientific tests to detect poisons, and identify marks associated with violent death
1816: Reportedly the first conviction obtained with footprint evidence in Warwick, England. A farm laborer is convicted for drowning a maidservant in a shallow pool. Footprints are found and an impression from corduroy cloth with a sewn patch in the damp earth close to the pool. Grains of wheat and chaff are found. The laborer’s breeches are examined. They match the impression in the earth and they are covered in wheat and chaff (he had been threshing wheat).
1819: Rene Laennec (France) first reported about his invention, the stethoscope, a solid, metal, hollow tube.
1828: Mémoirs, is first published, by Eugène François Vidocq, a French criminal who became the head of the Sûreté Nationale (the French criminal investigation department).
1829: Metropolitan Police in London is established through the Metropolitan Police Act of June 19, 1829; an act secured by Robert Peel. Its jurisdiction did not extend into the central district (known as The City”) which remained under the Bow Street Runners.
1832: The French government abolishes branding.
1835: Bow Street Runner Henry Goddard (England) used ballistics for a conviction by using a mark (flaw) on a bullet to trace it to the mold which had made it.
1836: James Marsh developed a sensitive test for arsenic; more reliable than Alfred Taylor’s. Presents first toxicological evidence in a jury trial.
1836: Metropolitan Police of London absorbed the Bow Street Horse Patrol.
1836: Felons in England given the right to have defense council.
1839: Bow Street Runners disbanded; absorbed into the Metropolitan Police. Carried out by the Metropolitan Police Act of 1839.
1840: Carl Gustav Carus publishes, Principles of a New and Scientific Craniometry; a study of the skull sizes of delinquents to determine physical indicators of deviance.
1841: Hugo Reinsch (Germany) improves upon the Marsh Test, creating a method of detecting arsenic that was more reliable and simpler to carry out.
1845: Mayor William Havermayer and New York’s City Council passed the Municipal Police Act, creating the first, full-time professional police force in the United States of America.
1853: Charles Pravez and Alexander Wood (working independently) develop the hypodermic syringe.
1856: First deliberate use of fingerprints for the purpose of identification, by Sir William Herschel, British Administrator in India.
1856: Kate Warne becomes the first female private detective. Hired by the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in their Chicago offices.
1857: New York State legislature created the Metropolitan Police force for the city of New York, Brooklyn (independent of New York), and Westchester County. The Metropolitan Police were to replace the Municipal Police.
1858: New York Police Department use the first reported use of “rogues’ gallery.” Photographs of known criminals were on display to acquaint police with their faces.
1860: Jean Servais Stras (Belgium) developed a technique for isolating nicotine from a corpse.
1862: J. Van Deen (Netherlands) develops a chemical test for the presence of human blood.
1863: German scientist, Christian Schonbein created presumptive test for the presence of blood. Observed that hemoglobin in blood oxidized hydrogen peroxide, causing it to foam.
1865: Professor Arthur Swain Taylor (England) publishes Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence; it continued in print for over a century.
1867: John Lister (England) uses antiseptics to prevent infection during blood transfusions.
1876: Cesare Lombroso (Italy), professor of psychiatry at the University of Turin, published Criminal Man, the seminal text of criminal anthropology.
1877: Boston abolishes coroners and inquests and places a doctor to oversee death investigations thereby establishing the first Medical Examiner’s Office in the United States.
1879: Rudolph Vichow (Germany), is one of the first to identify the differences and unique characteristics of hair.
1879: Alphonse Bertillon (France) submits a proposal to employ anthropometry to identify recidivists. (October 1) Creates Bertillon System – Bertillonage.
1880: Dr. Henry Faulds (Scotland) publishes paper in Nature journal advocating for the use of fingerprints for identification, and proposes a method to record them with printing ink. Establishes the first classification system.
1882: Paris prefecture adopts the Bertillon System of identification.
1886: Final cessation of transportation of convicts from the United Kingdom to Australia.
1887: The United States adopts Bertillon System of identification. Introduced by Major R. W. McClaughry, warden of the Illinois State Penitentiary.
1887: Pierre Megnin (France), army veteran and professor of the Natural History Museum in Paris, publishes, Fauna of the Tombs, about insects and decomposition.
1888: Wilhelm Eber (Prussian veterinarian) proposes the use of what would later be referred to as “latent” prints left on “doorhandles, glasses or other objects suitable for picking up and leaving behind a handprint.” The prints were developed with a dusting powder to expose ridges left by the oily secretions of the finger.
1889: Alexandre Lacassange (France) attempts to match bullets to the gun barrel from which they were fired.
1892: Sir Francis Galton (England) published, Fingerprints, listing characteristics with which fingerprints could be identified. Called them minutiae; today they are referred to as Galton’s Details.
1892: In Argentina, world’s first use of fingerprints as evidence to solve a murder. Suspect confessed and the case never went to trial.
1892: Legal physician René Forgeot reports his experiments on developing latent prints. Enlarges, enhances the ridge lines, and compares latent print with inked “resulting in plate and exhibit” which would be palpable and explanatory to jury.
1893: Hans Gross (Magistrate, Austrian) publishes System de Kriminalistik (Criminal Investigation). The first treatise on criminalistics.
1894: Great Britain adopts Bertillon System.
1895: (Approximately) Edward Henry introduces a policy in the Bengal police department whereby criminals were fingerprinted instead of having their anthropometric measurements taken.
1896: Medical Jurisprudence, Forensic Medicine and Toxicology is published in the United States. Authored by Columbia University chemist Rudolph Witthaus and Tracy C. Baker.
1896: New York State Bureau of Prisons institutes anthropometric identification.
1896: (Approximately) Detective John Maloy of Albany, New York, performs the earliest known forensic fingerprint identification in the United States.
1898: Paul Jesrich (Germany) uses comparison photomicrographs in ballistics analysis.
1898: First criminal trial based on forensic fingerprint evidence begins in Julpaiguri district of Bhutan. The manager of a tea garden was stabbed with a kukri, a Nepalese knife. Money was removed from a wooden box and a fingerprint was found on an almanac that had also been in the box. A former servant, Kangali Charan, is arrested and his fingerprint is matched to the one on the almanac. He is convicted of burglary, but acquitted of murder.
1899: Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Russia, Sweden, Norway, Turkey, Monaco, Luxembourg, Romania, Switzerland, Tunisia, and much of South America have adopted some form of anthropometric identification.
1900: Canadian Parliament passes a law allowing a “woman special” to assist the Northwest Mounted Police with female prisoners. Soon afterwards, Katherine Ryan (Klondike Kate) became the first “constable special” and was responsible for handling female prisoners in Whitehorse, Yukon.
1901: Karl Landsteiner (Austria) discovers three human blood groups, A, B, O. Blood type AB is discovered 902.
1901: Paul Uhlenhuth (Germany) developed test for distinguishing human from animal blood. Tests for antigen-antibody precipitin.
1901: Scotland Yard establishes fingerprinting identification.
1902: Inspector Charles Stockley Collins, Scotland Yard, makes his first forensic fingerprinting identification in a burglary case.
1902: Dr. Henry P. DeForrest used fingerprinting in the New York Civil Service.
1902: R. A. Reiss (Switzerland) creates first academic curriculum in forensic science.
1902: Henry DeForest, chief medical examiner, institutes the first use of fingerprints in the United States. It is used for civil identification to verify identities of police and fire department candidates taking civil service examinations. Done at the request of the New York City Civil Service.
1902: Earliest forensic identification using fingerprints in Europe. Paris police find a bloody fingerprint at scene of strangling of a valet in a dentist’s office on the Rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré
1903: New York State Prison system becomes first United States law enforcement agency to begin using fingerprint identification.
1903: Buenos Aires Police switch from anthropometry to dactyloscopy.
1904: At the St. Louis World’s Fair, fingerprints introduced to U.S law enforcement officials by Scotland Yard who hosted a display.
1905: The Bureau of Investigation (precursor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation) established by Theodore Roosevelt.
1905: Dr. Henry Faulds (England) publishes Guide to Finger-Print Identification, criticizing “the faulty use of this new way of finger-prints.”
1905: New York City Police Department Deputy Commissioner Joseph A. Faurot, introduces fingerprinting of criminals to the United States.
1906: United States Army begins using fingerprints to identify recruits for the purpose of identifying the dead and controlling pension disbursement.
1907: United States Navy begins using fingerprints to identify recruits.
1909: Institut de police scientifique, the world’s first school of forensic science established by Archibald Reiss at the University of Lausanne.
1909: Thomas Castleton (England) convicted of burglary on fingerprint evidence alone. Britain’s Court of Criminal Appeal, upheld the conviction, establishing in law that defendants may be convicted on fingerprints alone.
1910: Edmond Locard founds what may be the first criminal laboratory in the world, after persuading the Police Department of Lyon (France) to give him two attic rooms and two assistants.
1910: Alice Wells becomes the first policewoman in the United States of America. Sworn in as a full officer of the Los Angeles Police Department on September 13, with a salary of $75 per month. (Male patrolmen earned $102 per month.)
1910: Fingerprint evidence used for first time in the United States. Suspect confessed and the case never went to trial.
1910: Albert S. Osborn publishes his treatise on the examination and identification of handwriting. Became the unofficial reference in the United States.
1910: Boston Police Department switches from Bertillonage to fingerprints.
1910: Inferior Criminal Courts Act mandates taking prostitutes’ fingerprints in New York City magistrates’ courts. Use of fingerprints is extended to other petty crimes in 1916.
1910: Earliest use of fingerprinting for identification in United States; a murder trial in Chicago, People v Jennings that led to a conviction. Thomas Jennings was hanged on February 16, 1912.
1910: (Approximately) Victor Balthazard (FRANCE) calculated the odds of finding duplicate fingerprints (with 17 ridge characteristics) would be 1 in 17 billion.
1911: Dr. William Willcox (England) developed a technique to quantify the amount of arsenic in a corpse. Done at the request of Scotland Yard to assist in a murder investigation.
1911: Japanese police officially adopt the fingerprinting system.
1912: The New York Times shifts its support to fingerprinting from anthropometry.
1912: Hans Gross (Magistrate, Austria) establishes the Institute of Criminalistics at the University of Graz Law School.
1913: New York legislature orders all prisoners be fingerprinted.
1913: New York magistrates court extends use of fingerprint identification to men arrested for intoxication and vagrancy, disorderly conduct, pickpockets (jostlers), persistent insulters of women in public places (mashers) and degenerates.
1914: Women join the police force in England. The Metropolitan Police inaugurated the Women Police Service (WPS). Female constables are granted full arrest authority within a year of establishment of WPS.
1914: Jessie Battle becomes first African American hired by the New York Police Department.
1914: Physician Wilfred Derome (Canada) lobbies the Attorney General of Quebec to establish Laboratoire de Recherches Medico-Légales (research laboratory for forensic medicine).
1915: Leone Lattes (Italy) invented method for determining the ABO blood types from dried bloodstains.
1916: Dr. Albert Schneider (United States), a chemist in Berkley, California, uses a household Vacuum cleaner (patented in 1901) to collect evidence at a crime scene. He later publishes a paper explaining the method in Police Microscopy.
1916: In New York City use of fingerprints for prostitutes is extended to other petty crimes.
1920: Charles E. Waite (United States) catalogues manufacturing data of weapons.
1920: New York Police Department ceases recording anthropometric measurements.
1924: The Identification Division of the Bureau of Investigation (later the FBI) was created to act as a central repository for fingerprint files. Created through legislation enacted by the United States Congress. Took possession of 810,188 files, mostly from Leavenworth Penitentiary.
1923: August Vollmer creates one of the first American police crime lab, established in Los Angeles, California.
1925: Major Calvin Goddard, C. E. Waite, Philip O. Gravelle, and John H. Fisher establish the Bureau of Forensic Ballistics in New York City and dealt with ballistics, fingerprinting, blood analysis, and trace evidence.
1926: Argentina ceases the use anthropometric measurements and physical descriptions for identification.
1929: Calvin Goddard founded the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois after the Valentine’s Day Massacre. Became the first independent criminalistics laboratory in the United States.
1930: New York State Prison at Auburn ceases Bertillon measurements of prisoners. (Some cards were completed until 1938).
1930: Luke May (American criminologist) developed analysis for tool mark striations and observations. Published findings in American Journal of Police Science.
1930: American Journal of Police Science begins publication. Published by the Bureau of Forensic Ballistics.
1931: New York State Division of Identification completely ceases recording of Bertillon measurements.
1935: The Bureau of Investigation is renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation.