From: clough@texas.net   
      
   Russell Watson wrote:   
      
   > I see there's a new western starring Tom Berenger called "Peacemakers"   
   > coming out in a couple of weeks. Appears to be about the "old ways" of   
   > crime investigation rubbing up against the "new ways" as the primary   
   > storyline.   
   > '97 FLSTF   
   > To reply by e-mail, remove nospam from address.   
      
   At least they seem to have checked on the feasibility of such things as   
   the use of finerprints in the 1880's. I suspect they will stretch the   
   reality to practices that wouldn't arise for many more years, since   
   methods in that period were physically cumbersome, and there were few   
   detectives familiar with them, but it won't hurt the stories for anyone   
   not demanding complete authenticity.   
      
   The reality is that it was 1911 before anyone was convicted in the US   
   solely on fingerprint evidence, the expert witness in the case having   
   been Canada's first fingerprint expert. It was a very long way from   
   recognizing the uniqueness of fingerprints and their use in identifying   
   individual prison inmates to their routine use as criminal evidence. For   
   a good many years, objects with patent prints in blood or something like   
   paint that had been wet at the time they were deposited had to be   
   physically recovered and preserved or photographed. It took quite a   
   while to establish the validity of developing and preserving prints by   
   other methods.   
      
   Mark Twain, though, used fingerprint identification along about the   
   1880's in one of his stories.   
   --   
                          Gerald Clough   
                         clough@texas.net   
   "Nothing has any value, unless you know you can give it up."   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)