{"id":125363,"date":"2018-05-15T11:00:07","date_gmt":"2018-05-15T15:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=125363"},"modified":"2018-05-31T13:23:10","modified_gmt":"2018-05-31T17:23:10","slug":"the-surprising-history-and-future-of-fingerprints","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/15\/the-surprising-history-and-future-of-fingerprints\/","title":{"rendered":"The Surprising History (and Future) of Fingerprints"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Original illustration by Ellis Rosen.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Recently, for a background check for a visa, I had to get fingerprinted by an agent admissible to the FBI while I was still in France. No, we can\u2019t fingerprint you<\/em>, the website of the Embassy of the United States in Paris stated clearly. No, you can\u2019t fingerprint yourself<\/em>, the sites of the bureau-approved, USA-based channelers stated. Perhaps, I thought, I would gather my smirches\u2014all those wasted on laptop screens, medicine cabinets, and eyeglasses\u2014and dump them on a bureaucrat\u2019s desk, like payment rendered in coin.<\/p>\n

Instead, I fell on a National Fingerprint Collecting Clearinghouse technician named Eve Humrich. She has built a career on the fingertips of expats. I met her at her office on a mezzanine inside a squash club in Montmartre (though she travels between Paris, London, and Brussels for her clients). \u201cI need to see your ID,\u201d Humrich said. I showed my passport\u2014using one type of identification to badge me into the realm of another. Humrich kissed each digit to a lubricious black pad, then onto an official paper card. With a small magnifying lens, she inspected the results: \u201cThese are nice and clear.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the walk home, while the sky pissed rain, I slipped the cards under my sweater. It occurred to me that I knew approximately zilch about how an identity could be apportioned in ten parts, each the size of a petal.<\/p>\n

Thumb marks were used as personal seals to close business in Babylonia, and, in 1303, a Persian vizier recounted the use of fingerprints as signatures during the Qin and Han Dynasties, noting, \u201cExperience has shown that no two individuals have fingers precisely alike.\u201d The Chinese had realized that before anyone: a Qin dynasty document from the third-century B.C.E, titled \u201cThe Volume of Crime Scene Investigation\u2014Burglary,\u201d pointed up fingerprints as a means of evincing whodunnit.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In the mid-1800s, a British magistrate named William Herschel observed the Indian custom of inking hands or fingers alongside autographs or marks on contracts. Such agreements, he appreciated, were more often honored than disputed, and in the summer of 1858, Herschel started requiring prints on contracts with Bengali subjects. He credited their effect to superstition before seeing the truth: fingerprints actually did distinguish one person from the next.<\/p>\n

Around the same time, a Scottish physician named Henry Faulds matched the greasy print from a drinking glass and the sooty print from a white wall to the criminals who had left them behind. Faulds wrote to Charles Darwin in 1880, asking the naturalist for help collecting \u201cskin-furrows\u201d\u2014the ridges on fingertips reminded him of furrows in plowed fields. Faulds included cards and instructed Darwin to use printer\u2019s ink, which could \u201ceasily be removed by benzine or turpentine\u201d or by \u201cburnt cork mixed with very little<\/em> oil.\u201d But Darwin was ill, and he punted the \u201ccurious\u201d request to his cousin, the polymathic anthropologist Francis Galton, who had coined the phrase \u201cnature versus nurture.\u201d Galton took to the subject with gusto, piloting it toward science. (When Galton compared prints from \u201cart-students\u201d and \u201cscience-students\u201d against \u201cthe worst idiots in the London district,\u201d he found \u201cno notable difference.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Mark Twain boosted the nascent forensic science into the realm of common knowledge with his novels Life on the Mississippi <\/em>(1883) and Pudd<\/em>\u2019nhead Wilson <\/em>(1894). The plots of both stories included murders solved with fingerprints (in the latter\u2019s case, at a sensational trial). Galton had classified prints based on types of patterns, still known today as \u201cGalton details,\u201d but real-world fingerprinting for forensic application would struggle with a system to classify, index, and reference the marks for decades.<\/p>\n

When French authorities interrogated Pablo Picasso, in 1911, at the Palais de Justice about the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre that August, he was clad in his favorite red-and-white polka-dot shirt. Picasso cried. He begged forgiveness. He was in possession of two statuettes filched from the museum, but he hadn\u2019t taken her<\/em>. Among those sweating him was France\u2019s great criminologist, Alphonse Bertillon, who, a decade earlier, had become the first investigator to solve a murder in Europe using fingerprint evidence. He was the originator of other booking procedures, such as the mug shot, and in The Hound of the Baskervilles, <\/em>one of Sherlock Holmes\u2019s clients insults Holmes by grading him \u201csecond highest expert\u201d on the Continent, after Bertillon. Bertillon believed Picasso: the single thumbprint, left on the glass frame that shielded the painting, was not his. A couple of years went by with no leads. Only when the Italian who had carried her off\u2014under the influence of lead poisoning\u2014surfaced in Florence did Bertillon realize he\u2019d had the culprit\u2019s thumbprint on file all along. It was recorded from the right hand, while the mark was from his left.<\/p>\n

In the twenties, the FBI\u2019s first director, J. Edgar Hoover, created a national print pool: 7,000 law-enforcement agencies shared their fingerprint files, quickly amounting to 5 million sets. Hoover, John Lienhard, a professor emeritus of mechanical engineering and history at the University of Houston, explained to me, went on to use the theater of fingerprinting to define the FBI\u2019s hi-tech look. \u201cWe heard a lot about how modern his FBI and his G-Men were.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even so, the prints were hard to use, Lienhard stressed. The FBI relied on a system of reference\u2014worked out before the turn of the century by the head of London\u2019s Metropolitan Police\u2014that described fingerprints with symbols. \u201cIt was 1967 before we could read and compare prints optically.\u201d Each request to search the database took months. In 1999, the bureau launched a computerized database, called the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. IAFIS was itself replaced in 2014 by the Next Generation Identification Program, which records additional biometrics, such as moles, scars, and tattoos. Stephen G. Fischer, Jr., a chief in the FBI\u2019s Criminal Justice Information Services Division, told me in early May that the repository holds 123,027,098 fingerprint sets, 74,851,046 of which are criminal. \u201cThe overall average response time for criminal submissions is 8 minutes 15 seconds,\u201d he specified. Before DNA technology, the sexiest clues at crime scenes were fingerprints\u2014a latent residue of salts, amino acids, and lipids, dusted into revelation.<\/p>\n

Scientists describe the basic patterns of fingerprints in terms of arches, whorls, and loops. (Seventy percent of a fingerprint is made up of loops.) Closer features include dots, lakes, islands, spurs, crossings, and bifurcations. It is true that every print is unique to every finger, even for identical twins, who share the same genetic code. Fingerprints are formed by friction from touching the walls of our mother\u2019s womb. Sometimes they are called \u201cchanced impressions.\u201d By Week 19, about four months before we are issued into the world, they are set. Gorillas, chimpanzees, and koalas also possess exclusive prints. Those of koalas have been reported as indistinguishable from those of humans\u2014with some outlets claiming that the similarity has tripped up Australian crime scene investigators. I wondered about this. Envisioning a place strewn with eucalyptus leaves by animals desperate to get their backgrounds checked, too, I reached out to the police in New South Wales for a fact-check. Senior Sergeant Peter Hennessy, a fingerprint expert, was good enough to reply:<\/p>\n

I am pleased to report koalas do in fact have fingerprints which are similar to humans!!! I have however looked at some fingerprints\/paw prints (?)\u00a0taken from koalas and they were all much poorer quality than most humans\u00a0fingerprints, probably because\u00a0koalas are constantly in contact with rough trees and the skin on their paws is much rougher than human skin. Furthermore, the lines or ridges of a koala\u2019<\/em>s prints<\/em> appear \u2018dotty\u2019 and are generally not as continuous as a human\u2019s fingerprints. So although someone without fingerprint training may not be able\u00a0to distinguish those from and a koala or a human, I am reasonably confident a qualified fingerprint expert would observe some differences between the two. And although it would make for a good story, unfortunately I have never heard of Australian Crime Scene Examiners mistaking a koala<\/em>\u2019s<\/em> fingerprints with those from a human.<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The paw of a male adult koala, showing ridge patterns. (Courtesy of Dr. Maciej Henneberg at the University of Adelaide)<\/p><\/div><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

In puberty, when hands turn oiler, prints left on surfaces last longer; they become trickier to capture with age, as epidermal ridges harden. Some people\u2019s prints just never stand out, and techs like Humrich may plunge their clients\u2019 hands into ice water to bring them into definition. You can erase your physical prints for a time, as my father accidentally did by working with battery acid. The wearing down of ridges was, historically, an occupational hazard shared by bricklayers and secretaries, the second from handling paper. Fingerprints grow back. Barring mutilation, they are a biometric for life\u2014even in death. Che Guevara was interred without his hands\u2014lopped off, sent to Argentina for fingerprinting. You can, and people have, fingerprinted Egyptian mummies.<\/p>\n

Most interesting is how this ancient biometric is now on its second wind. More and more, the path forward obliges us to submit our fingers to screens. In New York for the visa appointment, the consulate scanned my prints. (\u201cMadame, concentrate<\/em>,\u201d the functionary snapped when their machine rejected my trembling hand.) Days later, in security at LaGuardia Airport, I jumped out of the long line upon hearing \u201cSkip this in three minutes, folks. Enroll with Clear<\/a>.\u201d The subscription-based biometric platform acts as a fast pass for checkpoints at twenty-four airports and twelve stadiums across the United States so far. Caryn Seidman Becker bought the bankrupt company in 2009 and relaunched it the next year, starting at Orlando International Airport, which sees the highest number of first-time travelers. In the past couple of years, Clear has nearly quadrupled in size to serve two million customers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At LGA, my fingers and eyes were scanned at a kiosk. I gleefully skipped the state- or federal-issued ID and boarding pass routine and proceeded straight to the X-ray machines. \u201cOur mission is two-part,\u201d Becker told me by phone, \u201cstrengthening security and frictionless experiences.\u201d (Never mind that friction in baby\u2019s first port of entry is what gave us fingerprints to begin with.)<\/p>\n

The CEO said there is debate as to which are more secure: fingerprints or iris images. Both have tested to be 99.999 accurate, but not everyone\u2019s fingertips cooperate. \u201cFacial is good and getting better,\u201d Becker added. Clear\u2014a proprietary software\u2014works with all biometrics. \u201cWe\u2019re agnostic as to which one our partners use,\u201d she continued. \u201cOur view is that different biometrics have different use cases.\u201d In an active case, someone would trot through a checkpoint and have their face scanned without ever stopping (\u201cface on the fly,\u201d Becker called this); in a passive case, someone would pause to lay down their fingers.<\/p>\n

Clear just won biometric aid contracts with Washington State and Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, to start IDing people at bars. The applications for biometric identity products are broad. Wallets and keys might get lost for good if we can pay for cappuccinos and power up cars with our eyeballs or fingers. In the early aughts, when we were increasingly imagining a future where people moved through the world\u2014for better or worse\u2014without anonymity, those people were chipped. But who needs computer chips when you\u2019ve got fingerprints? \u201cThe future of biometrics has never been better,\u201d said Becker. \u201cBiometrics have gone mainstream\u2014now people have expectations and habits. People are checking into every Delta Sky Club in the country with biometrics.\u201d<\/p>\n

A rumor persists that the Soviet Union and the People\u2019s Republic of China selected Olympians in the seventies partly based on their fingerprints, which were believed to express prowess. As it turns out, since our prints and neocortices are in development at the same time, and are subject to the same intrauterine effects, the patterns on our fingers do seem to correspond to the lobes of our brains. Some researchers are hailing fingerprints as blueprints. \u201cFingerprints are the mirrors to our inborn talents and potentials, knacks and likings,\u201d write the authors of one recent paper, who believe people may be able to use their fingerprints to unlock their best selves. Plus, in an act almost like palm reading, studies show that the swirly labyrinthine lines correlate with risks for many conditions, including diabetes, asthma, autism, periodontitis, schizophrenia, gastrointestinal cancers, and infertility. It means that specialists have another tool for early diagnosis: our identity is mapped at our fingertips, but also, maybe, our individual fate.<\/p>\n

Tapplock<\/a>, the first biometric paddock, and one capable of storing 500 different fingerprints, started shipping last year. Most smartphones read thumbs. Al Franken grilled Apple CEO Tim Cook in 2013 about the iPhone\u2019s then-new Touch ID technology, saying, \u201cLet me put it this way: if hackers get a hold of your thumbprint, they could use it to identify and impersonate you for the rest of your life.\u201d The latest Apple laptops accept fingerprints. The radio frequency identification (RFID) chips in biometric passports stash our prints\u2014compelling people like my boyfriend to disable the thing with a hammer. To be fair, it\u2019s a real concern: in February, Wired<\/em> reported<\/a> that U.S. Customs and Border Protection has failed to deploy the software that shows if e-Passport data has been jiggered with or forged. \u201cThat could theoretically be enough to slip into countries that allow all-electronic border checks, or even to get past a border patrol agent into the U.S.,\u201d Lily Hay Newman, the magazine\u2019s security reporter, intoned. \u201cWhere are you now my fingerprints?\u201d Leonard Cohen croons in a song adapted from \u201cGive Me Back My Fingerprints,\u201d a poem he published in the sixties. Cohen believes he lost his fingerprints\u2014his identity\u2014by touching his lover too much too often. So much of our selves are in our fingers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Chantel Tattoli is a freelance journalist. She\u2019s contributed to\u00a0the\u00a0<\/em>New York Times Magazine,\u00a0<\/em>VanityFair.com<\/a>, the\u00a0<\/em>Los Angeles Review of Books, and\u00a0<\/em>Orion\u00a0and\u00a0is at work on a cultural biography of Copenhagen\u2019s statue of the Little Mermaid.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Recently, for a background check for a visa, I had to get fingerprinted by an agent admissible to the FBI while I was still in France. No, we can\u2019t fingerprint you, the website of the Embassy of the United States in Paris stated clearly. No, you can\u2019t fingerprint yourself, the sites of the bureau-approved, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":873,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7555],"tags":[34075,6119,34277,17134,34076,34074,4919,34077,2307,3966],"class_list":["post-125363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-history","tag-clear","tag-fbi","tag-fingerprints","tag-j-edgar-hoover","tag-koalas","tag-next-generation-identification-program","tag-pablo-picasso","tag-palais-de-justice","tag-sherlock-holmes","tag-the-hound-of-the-baskervilles"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Surprising History (and Future) of Fingerprints<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It occurred to me that I knew approximately zilch about how an identity could be apportioned in ten parts, each the size of a petal.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/15\/the-surprising-history-and-future-of-fingerprints\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Surprising History (and Future) of Fingerprints by Chantel Tattoli\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"May 15, 2018 \u2013   Recently, for a background check for a visa, I had to get fingerprinted by an agent admissible to the FBI while I was still in France. No, we can\u2019t\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/15\/the-surprising-history-and-future-of-fingerprints\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2018-05-15T15:00:07+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2018-05-31T17:23:10+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/fp1.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"3555\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1713\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Chantel Tattoli\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Chantel Tattoli\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"12 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/15\/the-surprising-history-and-future-of-fingerprints\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/15\/the-surprising-history-and-future-of-fingerprints\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Chantel Tattoli\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/b72857973f8c094d7664bfe723fb5103\"},\"headline\":\"The Surprising History (and Future) of Fingerprints\",\"datePublished\":\"2018-05-15T15:00:07+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2018-05-31T17:23:10+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/15\/the-surprising-history-and-future-of-fingerprints\/\"},\"wordCount\":2378,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/15\/the-surprising-history-and-future-of-fingerprints\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/fp1-1024x493.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Clear\",\"FBI\",\"fingerprints\",\"J. 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