Science: Clean Finger-Prints

Expert fingerprinters held a party in Manhattan last week to observe a new, clean method of performing their job. The standard system requires the subject to smudge his thumbs and fingers with printers’ ink. messy and hard to remove. The new method utilizes a pad impregnated with a colorless, nonpoisonous chemical compound and a special paper sensitive to that compound. When the subject presses his digits upon the pad, then upon the paper, his prints immediately appear with photographic clarity, his fingers remain clean, less suggestive of wrongdoing.

Joseph Arthur Faurot, 59 and now retired from the New York City police force where in 1906 he introduced the standard system of fingerprint classification, invented the new clean fingerprinting. Dr. William Heinecke, Manhattan chemist, developed the chemical details. They hope to make money from sales of the pad and paper, for U. S. police and jailers alone fingerprint some 3,000 new prisoners daily, and by no means all finger-printing is criminological. Soldiers, sailors and Marines have their prints made routinely; also all Federal and many civil service employes. One of every 20 applicants for Federal service is found to have had a criminal record. New York City required fingerprints of its civil service employes when it was found that one applicant was taking the physical examinations, a second the mental examination, a third the job & pay. Postal Savings requires fingerprints of all depositors. Many banks do likewise for illiterate depositors, foreign draft buyers and safety deposit vault renters. Many corporations (notably insurance companies) fingerprint job applicants. Some hospitals are beginning to footprint newborn babes for identification.

Though not proven infallible, the whorls, loops, arches and composite curves on thumbs and fingers are the surest natural means of distinguishing man from man. Identificationists hope some day to have the prints of every U. S. inhabitant on file in Washington. On April 14 the identification division of the U. S. Bureau of Investigation had 3,540,784 records of criminals and Federal civil service employes. It receives 2,200 (average) new prints daily, satisfies 45% of the queries it receives concerning arrested, dead and witless citizens. John Edgar Hoover (no kin), Director of the U. S. Bureau of Investigation, does not want his identification division considered a miraculous detective bureau. Says he, contrary to fictioneers: “Since the . . . system utilizes all ten fingers for the classification and filing of prints, it is extremely difficult for the bureau to identify latent fingerprints found at the scenes of crimes, unless some data with reference to the names of the suspect or suspects involved, with descriptive information, are supplied.”