The history behind the use of Fingerprint authentication
They looked identical and even shared the same name, but the two prisoners pictured were actually different people and their remarkable case helped bring in the era of fingerprint identification. The man on the left was called Will West, the man on the right William West, and they were both sentenced to jail at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas over 100 years ago. The arrival of Will West in 1903 caused the records clerk at the prison considerable confusion because he was convinced he'd processed him two years previously. The clerk, M.W. McClaughry, asked Will West if he'd ever been to the prison before. West said he hadn't. McClaughry then set about taking his Bertillon measurements – named after the French policeman Alphonse Bertillon – which was the usual method of identifying people and involved recording the dimensions of key physical features. McClaughry, still convinced the man before he had already been to the prison, looked up his name in his filing system and fou...

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