How it began
Juan Vucetich, born in Croatia, immigrated to Argentina in 1882 and worked in the Office of Identification and Statistics of the police in La Plata. After reading a French report on Francis Galton's fingerprint experiments, he began collecting impressions of all ten fingers from arrested men alongside their body measurements. In 1891 he devised his own classification method, and on September 1, 1891, it was officially applied to identify 23 felons.
Before it existed
Until about 1890 police identified individuals with the anthropometric method of the French criminalist Alphonse Bertillon, which relied on measurements of the body, head and limbs. Argentine police had commissioned a study of that method in the 1880s, and the Buenos Aires city police created a division dedicated to anthropometric identification. Fingerprints had been used on Babylonian clay tablets and in later centuries, but not as a searchable police record.
How it works
Vucetich confirmed that fingerprints could be sorted into groups. Building on Galton's incomplete taxonomy, he classified prints into types so that a large collection of fingerprint cards could be divided into small groups that were easy to search. A new print could then be compared only against the cards in its own group. He first called the procedure icnofalangometria, and the name was later changed to dactyloscopy at the suggestion of Francisco Latzina.
Who pushed back
Vucetich's superiors were not immediately convinced. For several years he had to keep taking anthropometric measurements along with full sets of fingerprints, and it was not until 1894 that they accepted that the body measurements were unnecessary. In other parts of the world a different scheme prevailed: the classification system of Edward Henry was adopted by Scotland Yard in 1901 and continued in use in the United States and Europe.
What changed first
In March 1892 Vucetich opened a fingerprint bureau, and within months it produced the first murder conviction obtained through fingerprint evidence. In June 1892 Inspector Eduardo Alvarez took impressions at a crime scene in Necochea, where a bloody print on a door post identified Francisca Rojas as the killer of her two sons after she had blamed a neighboring ranch worker.
What lasted
Argentine police adopted the method, and in 1900 the first identification cards based on it were issued. Vucetich published his work, including Dactiloscopia Comparada in 1904. His system spread to police forces abroad and is still used in most Spanish-speaking countries, while most identification bureaus worldwide use either the Vucetich or the Henry system. He donated his files and library to the National University of La Plata, where a museum bears his name.
