3.1.4: Sir William James Herschel
- Page ID
- 52961
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Sir William Herschel was the British Chief Administrative Officer for the Hooghly District of Bengal India. In 1858, Sir William Herschel began the extensive use of fingerprints by recording them on contracts with native vendors.
Sir William Herschel requested permission from the British Home Office to use a fingerprint system in the jails in India for the identification of prisoners, but his request was denied. However, Sir William applied the system extensively within his own province. After almost twenty years of observations of his own fingerprints, and those of prisoners who had been fingerprinted over a period of years, Sir Wiliam noticed that ridge formations did not change during the lifetime of an individual. At the end of this section, your author included an excerpt from Sir William Herschel’s book, The Origin of Finger-Printing published in 1916. This will allow the reader to experience that exact moment when Sir William envisioned using fingerprints as a means of identification.