Advances in Fingerprint Technology.pdf

Faulds edited seven issues of a fingerprint journal Dactylography in the
early 1920s that contained much original thought but in which he continually
carped about “the worthy baronets”; he suffered from ill health and died in
Wolstanton, Staffordshire, on March 19, 1930.
The Japanese regarded Faulds with great reverence and placed a commemorative
stone on a tree-lined pavement in Tokyo with Japanese and
English inscriptions. It reads:
DR. HENRY FAULDS
PIONEER IN FINGERPRINT IDENTIFICATION
LIVED HERE
FROM 1874 TO 1886.
The Faulds family gravestone in Wolstanton was in a sorry state early in
1987, with a dirty chipped headstone with weeds and grass covering it. Two
American fingerprint men, James Mock, F.F.S., California, and Michael Carrick,
Hon. M.F.S., Salem, Oregon, paid for it to be refurbished. This was done
and completed in April 1987. A plaque states:
IN MEMORY OF
DR. HENRY FAULDS
MEDICAL MISSIONARY
IN RECOGNITION OF HIS WORK
AS A PIONEER IN THE SCIENCE
OF FINGERPRINT IDENTIFICATION
1843–1930
THE FINGERPRINT SOCIETY
QUAERITE ET INVENIETIS.
This was a wonderful gesture, belatedly bequeathing to Faulds the accolade
he deserved throughout his life but which was denied him.
His two daughters died without having their lifelong ambition fulfilled —
to have a bronze bust of their father placed inside Reception at New Scotland
Yard. Strangely enough, in the corridors of the sixth floor at the Yard are a
number of large framed aspects of fingerprints, and on one of them Faulds
is credited with being a “Sir” — Sir Henry Faulds! Obviously, the researcher
was confused with Sir Edward Henry. Fate indeed moves in a mysterious way.
Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911)
Sir Francis Galton’s (Figure 1.14) interest in fingerprints should have been
alerted by Dr. Henry Faulds’ letter to Charles Darwin in 1880; the letter was
passed to Galton as promised, but he reposited it in the Anthropological