Did you know that the person who invented the forensic fingerprinting technique was from Beith? Dr. Henry Faulds was born in Beith, North Ayrshire, on 1 June 1843. He worked in Glasgow as a shop clerk, and then decided to become a surgeon. As a missionary, he was sent to Japan in 1873 and established the Tuskiji Hospital in Tokyo where he did fulfill his dreams as a surgeon. He was taught at the local university, became fluent in Japanese, and took a significant part in the establishment of Tokyo Institute for the Blind.

In the 1870s, Faulds was involved in a few archaeological digs throughout Japan and found shards of old pottery with fingerprints of a craftsman who had produced them. He began a study on modern application of fingerprints and informed Charles Darwin about his ideas. Darwin forwarded these thoughts to a friend, Francis Galton.

In 1880, Faulds wrote a paper in ‘Nature’ magazine about fingerprints, speculating that they might be used in crime investigation and proposing how it could be done. Shortly afterwards, a civil servant serving in India, Sir William Herschel, wrote a letter in ‘Nature’, where he reported that he had been utilizing fingerprints as a method for identification.

In 1886, Faulds arrived in Britain and proposed his fingerprint identification system to Scotland Yard and he was rejected. However, two years later, Galton sent a report to the Royal Institution, expressing that Herschel had proposed forensic usage of fingerprint identification slightly before Faulds, under an erroneous impression that his paper was the earlier of the two. It prompted a correspondence battle between Herschel and Faulds that would continue until 1917, when finally Herschel admitted that Faulds was the first to propose the use of fingerprints in forensic.

After his arrival from Japan, Faulds stayed in London and then worked in Staffordshire as a police surgeon. In March 1930, he died, bitter at the lack of recognitions he had received for his hard work.