SHOW NOTES:
FORENSIC
SCIENCE TIMELINE
Prehistory: Early cave
artists and pot makers "sign" their works with a paint or impressed finger or
thumbprint.
1000 b.c.: Chinese use
fingerprints to "sign" legal documents.
3rd century BC.:
Erasistratus (c. 304-250 b.c.) and Herophilus (c. 335-280 b.c.) perform the
first autopsies in Alexandria.
2nd century AD.: Galen
(131-200 a.d.), physician to Roman gladiators, dissects both animal and humans
to search for the causes of disease.
c. 1000: Roman attorney
Quintilian shows that a bloody handprint was intended to frame a blind man for
his mother's murder.
1194: King Richard
Plantagenet (1157-1199) officially creates the position of coroner.
1200s: First forensic
autopsies are done at the University of Bologna.
1247: Sung Tz'u publishes
Hsi Yuan Lu (The Washing Away of Wrongs), the first forensic text.
c. 1348-1350: Pope Clement
VI(1291-1352) orders autopsies on victims of the Black Death to hopefully find
a cause for the plague.
Late 1400s: Medical
schools are established in Padua and Bologna.
1500s: Ambroise Paré
(1510-1590) writes extensively on the anatomy of war and homicidal wounds.
1642: University of
Leipzig offers the first courses in forensic medicine.
1683: Antony van
Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) employs a microscope to first see living bacteria,
which he calls animalcules.
Late 1600s: Giovanni
Morgagni (1682-1771) first correlates autopsy findings to various diseases.
1685: Marcello Malpighi
first recognizes fingerprint patterns and uses the terms loops and whorls.
1775: Paul Revere
recognizes dentures he had made for his friend Dr. Joseph Warren and thus
identifies the doctor's body in a mass grave at Bunker Hill.
1775: Carl Wilhelm Scheele
(1742-1786) develops the first test for arsenic.
1784: In what is perhaps
the first ballistic comparison, John Toms is convicted of murder based on the
match of paper wadding removed from the victim's wound with paper found in
Tom's pocket.
1787: Johann Metzger
develops a method for isolating arsenic.
c. 1800: Franz Joseph Gall
(1758-1828) develops the field of phrenology.
1806: Valentine Rose
recovers arsenic from a human body.
1813: Mathieu Joseph
Bonaventure Orfila (1787-1853) publishes Traité des poisons (Treatise on
Poison), the first toxicology textbook.
1821: Sevillas isolates
arsenic from human stomach contents and urine, giving birth to the field of
forensic toxicology.
1823: Johannes Purkinje
(1787-1869) devises the first crude fingerprint classification system.
1835: Henry Goddard
(1866-1957) matches two bullets to show they came from the same bullet mould.
1836: Alfred Swaine Taylor
(1806-1880) develops first test for arsenic in human tissue.
1836: James Marsh
(1794-1846) develops a sensitive test for arsenic (Marsh test).
1853: Ludwig Teichmann
(1823-1895) develops the hematin test to test blood for the presence of the
characteristic rhomboid crystals.
1858: In Bengal, India,
Sir William Herschel (1833-1917) requires natives sign contracts with a hand
imprint and shows that fingerprints did not change over a fifty-year period.
1862: Izaak van Deen
(1804-1869) develops the guaiac test for blood.
1863: Christian Friedrich
Schönbein (1799-1868) develops the hydrogen peroxide test for blood.
1868: Friedrich Miescher
(1844-1895) discovers DNA.
1875: Wilhelm Konrad
Röntgen (1845-1923) discovers X-rays.
1876: Cesare Lombroso
(1835-1909) publishes The Criminal Man, which states that criminals can be
identified and classified by their physical characteristics.
1877: Medical examiner
system is established in Massachusetts.
1880: Henry Faulds
(1843-1930) shows that powder dusting will expose latent fingerprints.
1882: Alphonse Bertillon
(1853-1914) develops his anthropometric identification system.
1883: Mark Twain
(1835-1910) employs fingerprint identification in his books Life on the
Mississippi and The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1893- 1894).
1887: In Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, Holmes develops a
chemical to determine whether a stain was blood or not-something that had not
yet been done in a real-life investigation.
1889: Alexandre Lacassagne
(1843-1924) shows that marks on bullets could be matched to those within a
rifled gun barrel.
1892: Sir Francis Galton
(1822-1911) publishes his classic textbook Finger Prints.
1892: In Argentina, Juan
Vucetich (1858-1925) devises a usable fingerprint classification system.
1892: In Argentina,
Francisca Rojas becomes the first person charged with a crime on fingerprint
evidence.
1898: Paul Jeserich
(1854-1927) uses a microscope for ballistic comparison.
1899: Sir Edward Richard
Henry (1850-1931) devises a fingerprint classification system that is the basis
for those used in Britain and America today.
1901: Karl Landsteiner
(1868-1943) delineates the ABO blood typing system.
1901: Paul Uhlenhuth
(1870-1957) devises a method to distinguish between human and animal blood.
1901: Sir Edward Richard
Henry becomes head of Scotland Yard and adopts a fingerprint identification
system in place of anthropometry.
1902: Harry Jackson
becomes the first person in England to be convicted by fingerprint evidence.
1910: Edmund Locard
(1877-1966) opens the first forensic laboratory in Lyon, France.
1910: Thomas Jennings
becomes the first U.S. citizen convicted of a crime by use of fingerprints.
1915: Leone Lattes
(1887-1954) develops a method for ABO typing dried bloodstains.
1920: The Sacco and
Vanzetti case brings ballistics to the public's attention. The case highlights
the value of the newly developed comparison microscope.
1923: Los Angeles Police
Chief August Vollmer (1876-1955) establishes the first forensic laboratory.
1929: The ballistic
analyses used to solve the famous St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago lead
to the establishment of the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory (SCDL), the
first independent crime lab, at Northwestern University.
1932: FBI's forensic
laboratory is established.
1953: James Watson (1928-
), Francis Crick (1916-2004), and Maurice Wilkins (1916-2004) identify DNA's
double-helical structure.
1954: Indiana State Police
Captain R.F. Borkenstein develops the breathalyzer.
1971: William Bass
establishes the Body Farm at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
1974: Detection of gunshot
residue by SEM/EDS is developed.
1977: FBI institutes the
Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS).
1984: Sir Alec Jeffreys
(1950- ) develops the DNA "fingerprint" technique.
1987: In England, Colin
Pitchfork becomes the first criminal identified by the use of DNA.
1987: First United States
use of DNA for a conviction in the Florida case of Tommy Lee Andrews.
1990: The Combined DNA
Index System (CODIS) is established.
1992: The polymerase chain
reaction (PCR) technique is introduced.
1994: The DNA analysis of
short tandem repeats (STRs) is introduced.
1996: Mitochondrial DNA is
first admitted into a U.S. court in Tennessee v. Ware.
1998: The National DNA
Index System (NDIS) becomes operational.
