Download A Brief History of Forensic Investigation: From Ancient Times to Modern Technologies and more Assignments Computer science in PDF only on Docsity! A Brief History of Forensic Investigation Despite common misconceptions, forensic investigation has been practiced, in one form or another, for thousands of years. Before the discovery and impact of DNA in the early 1980s, the advent of fingerprinting in the early 1800s and even before photographs were used in the late 1800s to capture images of killers on a victim's eyeballs, as was the case during the investigation of the world's first documented serial killer, Jack the Ripper, criminal investigators were using the science of forensics to solve crimes. In ancient times, the manner of death was naturally assumed by where and how the victim had been found. For example, a man found in a body of water would naturally have drowned, while a man found lying broken and bloodied along the side of a road would have naturally fallen and possibly been dragged by a horse. Suspicion of motive and the word of others against a possible murderer took precedence over any other facts, and when all else failed, torture was readily available to procure a confession. During the middle of the 12th Century, ancient Chinese were credited with being the first to attempt to define the difference between natural death and criminal intent. In a book written by Sung Tz'u called The Washing Away of Wrong, the author observed that water collected in the lungs of drowning victims and that strangulation could be assumed by damaged cartilage in the neck. As he so wisely said, so many hundreds of years ago, "The difference of a hair is the difference of a thousand li." (A li is the word that designates the distance of a mile in the Chinese language). The book became an official text for coroners. In 1775, Karl Scheele realized he could transform arsenious oxide into arsenious acid, which, when combined with zinc, produced arsine. This discovery led to the eventual ability to detect arsenic poisoning. Professor Mathieu Orfila, an expert of medicinal chemistry at the University of Paris, became known as the Father of Toxicology in 1813 after he published Traite de Poisons. He is the first to be credited with attempting to use a microscope to assess blood and semen stains. By the early 1800s, the recognition of fingerprint patterns was studied, but decades would pass before that observance was applied to criminal and personal identification. In 1835, a former Bow Street Runner employed by Scotland Yard was the first documented case of law enforcement comparing bullets to catch their man. Henry Goddard noticed a flaw in a bullet that was traced back to the original bullet mold. A few years later, a doctor "experimenting" with the corpses of dead soldiers in Malta discovered that body temperature dropped at regular intervals following death, and could be used to determine time of death. The discovery that fingerprints were unique to each individual and could provide identification of a particular individual, urged the state of forensic crime investigation to the forefront in 1788 when Dr. Nathaniel Grew published an illustrated anatomy book in which he claimed that "the arrangement of skin ridges is never duplicated in two persons." Decades later, William Herschel, a Briton working and living in British India, demanded that his contracts be "signed" with fingerprints so that it would be "impossible to deny or forge. The impression of a man's finger on paper cannot be denied by him" he stated. Naturally, he was scoffed at. Across the miles, another Briton living in Japan had come to the same conclusion. Henry Faulds was curious whether or not fingerprints remained the same despite efforts made to erase such fingerprints. He experimented with volunteers, introducing pumice stone, sandpaper and even acids to determine if fingerprints would appear different after new skin growth. They didn't. In a paper published in the 1880 scientific journal called Nature, Faulds wrote that bloody fingerprints or impressions on a variety of surfaces could be used for "the scientific identification of criminals." Today, this is known as dactylography. Unfortunately, both men tried, without success to get police forces around the world interested in such discoveries. It wasn't until later discoveries by Sir Francis Galton that police authorities around the world recognized that three major fingerprint identification patterns could be broken down into eight different types: Plain Arch Tented Arch Simple Loop Central Pocket Loop Double Loop Lateral Pocket Loop Plain Whorl Accidental In his book titled Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain writes of a murderer identified by fingerprint identification. The first legal recognition of this process had been realized nearly a decade earlier in 1882 during a case involving document forgery in New Mexico, the first official use of the technique in the United States. A German scientist named Christian Schonbein, who observed that hemoglobin had the capacity to oxidize hydrogen peroxide, which caused it to foam, inadvertently discovered the first presumptive test for the presence of blood in 1863. By 1879, another German, Rudolph Virchow, was one of the first to note the differences and unique characteristics of hair in the pursuit of individual identification.
