<P> In 1863, Paul - Jean Coulier (1824--1890), professor for chemistry and hygiene at the medical and pharmaceutical school of the Val - de-Grâce military hospital in Paris, discovered that iodine fumes can reveal fingerprints on paper . </P> <P> In 1880, Dr. Henry Faulds, a Scottish surgeon in a Tokyo hospital, published his first paper on the subject in the scientific journal Nature, discussing the usefulness of fingerprints for identification and proposing a method to record them with printing ink . He also established their first classification and was also the first to identify fingerprints left on a vial . Returning to the UK in 1886, he offered the concept to the Metropolitan Police in London but it was dismissed at that time . Faulds wrote to Charles Darwin with a description of his method but, too old and ill to work on it, Darwin gave the information to his cousin, Francis Galton, who was interested in anthropology . Having been thus inspired to study fingerprints for ten years, Galton published a detailed statistical model of fingerprint analysis and identification and encouraged its use in forensic science in his book Finger Prints . He had calculated that the chance of a "false positive" (two different individuals having the same fingerprints) was about 1 in 64 billion . </P> <P> Juan Vucetich, an Argentine chief police officer, created the first method of recording the fingerprints of individuals on file, associating these fingerprints to the anthropometric system of Alphonse Bertillon, who had created, in 1879, a system to identify individuals by anthropometric photographs and associated quantitative descriptions . In 1892, after studying Galton's pattern types, Vucetich set up the world's first fingerprint bureau . In that same year, Francisca Rojas of Necochea, was found in a house with neck injuries, whilst her two sons were found dead with their throats cut . Rojas accused a neighbour, but despite brutal interrogation, this neighbour would not confess to the crimes . Inspector Alvarez, a colleague of Vucetich, went to the scene and found a bloody thumb mark on a door . When it was compared with Rojas' prints, it was found to be identical with her right thumb . She then confessed to the murder of her sons . </P> <P> A Fingerprint Bureau was established in Calcutta (Kolkata), India, in 1897, after the Council of the Governor General approved a committee report that fingerprints should be used for the classification of criminal records . Working in the Calcutta Anthropometric Bureau, before it became the first Fingerprint Bureau in the world, were Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose . Haque and Bose were Indian fingerprint experts who have been credited with the primary development of a fingerprint classification system eventually named after their supervisor, Sir Edward Richard Henry . The Henry Classification System, co-devised by Haque and Bose, was accepted in England and Wales when the first United Kingdom Fingerprint Bureau was founded in Scotland Yard, the Metropolitan Police headquarters, London, in 1901 . Sir Edward Richard Henry subsequently achieved improvements in dactyloscopy . </P>

When did fingerprints start being used by the police