Wikinventia — Atlas of discoveries and inventions · Industrial Age

Modern fingerprinting — Ivan Vučetić

1891 AD · Transmission: Silenced
LawMethodSlavic

Ivan Vučetić, born in Hvar (Croatia, then Austro-Hungarian Empire), emigrates to Argentina and develops in 1891, at the Buenos Aires Provincial Police, the first complete criminal identification system based on fingerprints, classifying prints into four fundamental types (arch, inner loop, outer loop, whorl). In 1892 he solves the world's first criminal case using fingerprinting: the murder of Francisca Rojas's children in Necochea. Francis Galton (UK) had proposed a theoretical classification system in 1892 with no operational police application; Edward Henry standardized Galton's classification in India in 1897. Argentina was the first country in the world to use fingerprints as an official criminal identification system, thanks to Vučetić.

InstitutionBuenos Aires Provincial Police
Historical regionCroatia (Austro-Hungarian Empire) / Argentina
Primary sourceVučetić, I. — Dactiloscopia comparada (La Plata, 1904) — systematization of the method. Buenos Aires Provincial Police archives (Rojas case, 1892)
Secondary sourceBeavan, C. — Fingerprints: The Origins of Crime Detection (2001); Britannica — fingerprint (history)
Original languageSpanish
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