You’d never know it from the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department’s own online history: It cites the 1904 World’s Fair as a policing challenge because it attracted gamblers, swindlers, pickpockets, and train robbers. What it doesn’t mention is that, besides all the buzz about the newfangled food, there was talk at the time of the new science of fingerprint identification. Our astute gendarmes paid attention, and in October 1904, the city police department became the first in the nation to set up a fingerprint bureau.
Until then, police used something called the Bertillon system, taking precise measurements of various bones just as a tailor would to make a bespoke suit. That method crashed in 1903, when a man named William West was sentenced to the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas—where another William West who looked just like him was already serving time for murder. The two men—probably identical twins who’d been separated at birth—had the same bone measurements.
But their fingerprints were different.
Human beings always knew their fingertips were special. King Hammurabi used finger seals on contracts nearly 4,000 years ago in what’s now Iraq; the Chinese were inking fingers for contracts soon after. In the late 1700s, a German doctor remarked that fingerprints were never duplicated—but left it at that. Then Henry Faulds realized that bloody fingerprints could help solve a crime, and he forwarded his observations to Charles Darwin, who relayed them to a half-cousin, Sir Francis Galton.
A statistician, psychologist, anthropologist, and explorer, Galton had a luminous intellect that cast a dark shadow: He coined the term “eugenics” because he believed in the concept, urging forced sterilization of those “afflicted by lunacy, feeble-mindedness, habitual criminality, and pauperism,” all traits he believed were written on the body. When he focused on fingerprints, though, he very helpfully classified patterns in the friction ridges, dividing them into various types of arch, loop, and whorl.
Galton corresponded with another Victorian Englishman, Sir Edward Henry, who established a system that made fingerprint ID practical for law enforcement. Henry brought his system to Scotland Yard in 1901. And when the British crown jewels traveled to the St. Louis World’s Fair, three years later, one of the Scotland Yard detectives he’d trained, John Ferrier, came along with a separate agenda: to convert Americans to the Henry system.
On October 28, 1904, ours became the first police department in the U.S. to adopt it.
