Fingerprinting is something we are familiar with today. But how was the fingerprinting method used today discovered?

 

In the 19th century, Francis Galton devoted an entire decade to the study of human fingerprints and in 1892 published a statistic according to which he calculated the probability of a match between the fingerprints of two people at 1 in 1 billion.

 

In 1982, two researchers in Japan accidentally broke an aquarium and glued it back together with superglue. They noticed that the superglue (cyanoacrylate) made their fingerprints stand out in relief. The vapours from the glue had condensed the grease from the fingertips and made the prints clearly visible. Today, cyanoacrylate is used in forensics.