-
Fingerprints are used on clay tablets for business transaction in ancient Babylon.
-
Archimedes talks about being able to prove the crown was not made of gold using density and buoyancy.
-
Erasistratus, an ancient Greek physician, discovers that his patients’ pulse rates increase when they are telling lies. Allegedly the first lie detection test.
-
A murder was committed using a sickle. All those in the village who owned a sickle were made to bring them out and lay them in the sun. Eventually flies gathered on one particular sickle, identifying it as the murder weapon.
-
The Chinese book His Duan Yu describes how to distinguish drowning from strangulation. The first recorded application of medicine to help solve crimes.
-
Bartolomeo da Varignana performed one of the first medicolegal autopsies in the case of a suspected murder of a nobleman.
-
The missing teeth of the French Duke of Burgundy are used to identify remains.
-
The first microscope is developed.
-
John Toms of Lancaster, England is convicted of murder on the basis of a torn wad of paper found in a pistol matching a remaining piece in his pocket. One of the first documented uses of physical matching.
-
Henry Goddard of Scotland Yard first uses bullet comparison to catch a murderer. The comparison was based in a visible flaw in the bullet, traced back to a mold.
-
H. Baynard publishes the first reliable procedures for the microscopic detection of sperm.
-
Taylor and Wilkes write a paper on the determination of time since death from fall in body temperature, introducing many current concepts.
-
First advocation of the use of photography for the identification of criminals and the documentation of evidence and crime scenes.
-
Henry Faulds of Scotland publishes a paper suggesting fingerprints at the scene of a crime could identify the offender. Faulds uses fingerprints to eliminate an innocent suspect and indicate a perpetrator in a Tokyo burglary.
-
The NY States Prison system begins the first systematic use of fingerprints in the US for criminal identification.
-
Charles E. Waite is the first to catalogue manufacturing data about weapons.
-
John Larson and Leonard Keeler design the portable polygraph.
-
The FBI crime laboratory is created.
-
Dental records are compared with teeth from corpses.
-
Max Frei-Sulzer develops the tape lift method of collecting trace evidence.
-
R. F. Borkenstein invents the Breathalyzer for field sobriety testing.
-
De Saram publishes measurements of temperature I cases obtained from executed prisoners. The papers are considered landmarks in determination of time since death from body cooling.
-
Harrison and Gilroy introduce a qualitative colorimetric chemical test to detect the presence of barium, antimony and lead on the hands of individuals who fired a firearm.
-
The Federal rules of Evidence are enacted as a congressional statute, based on the relevancy standard in which scientific evidence that is deemed more prejudicial than probative may not be admitted.
-
The FBI introduces the beginnings of its Automated Fingerprint Idrntification System (AFIS) with first computerised scans of fingerprints.
-
American geneticists discover a region of DNA that does not hold any genetic information and is extremely variable between individuals. Starting our path on dna recognition.
-
DNA is used for the first time to solve a crime. DNA profiling is used to identify Colin Pitchfork as the murderer of two young girls in the English Midlands.
-
DNA profiling is introduced for the first time in a US criminal court.
-
The FBI helps develop Drugfire, an automated imaging system to compare marks left on cartridge cases and shell casings.
-
An FBI DNA database, NIDIS, is put into practice.
-
The Forensic Science Service launches the UK’s first online footwear coding and detection management system, Footwear Intelligence Technology.
