THE POLPERRO FINGERPRINTS THAT PROVED A THEORY WRONG

 

In 1903, the villagers of Polperro had their fingerprints taken as part of a huge and ground breaking experiment.  The brain behind it was Francis Galton, a half-cousin to Charles Darwin, who had a theory that fingerprint patterns were inherited. 

 

At that time Polperro, being at the bottom of an incredibly steep sided valley, was virtually cut off from the rest of Cornwall and nearly everyone in the village was related to one another. A friend of Galton’s called Frank Perrycoste, who had moved to the village, suggested that if he fingerprinted all the inter-connected inhabitants for Galton to compare, it would prove the inheritance theory one way or another.  

 

Perrycoste took 865 sets of prints, from tiny babies to ancient fishermen. When they were compared, the findings proved conclusively that each person’s fingerprints were completely unique. This discovery helped detectives catch criminals all over the world. 

 

Francis Galton’s fingerprint classification system is still used by forensic scientists today. According to his calculations, the odds of two people’s fingerprints being the same are 1 in 64 billion.