Sir Edward Henry (1850–1931) and the Henry Classification System

By the end of the 19th century, police in various parts of the world were using fingerprints, but a unifying classification was needed to manage large collections. Sir Edward Richard Henry, an Inspector General of Police in colonial India, played a pivotal role in this development. Starting in 1896, Henry worked with two Indian fingerprint experts, Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose, to devise a simplified yet effective system to categorize fingerprint cards. Drawing on Galton’s pattern types, they developed the Henry Classification System, which assigned numerical values to fingerprints based on whorl patterns (allowing a formula-like code for each set of ten prints) and organized files into primary groupings. This made searching a fingerprint repository far more efficient.

After testing in Bengal, the new classification proved successful: in 1897 the Government of Bengal formally adopted fingerprinting (using Henry’s system) as the sole method for identifying criminal suspects, abandoning Bertillon’s anthropometry. This was a historic shift – British India became the first jurisdiction to fully replace anthropometric measurements with fingerprints.

Henry was soon invited to England to help modernize Scotland Yard. In 1901, he established the Metropolitan Police Fingerprint Bureau in London, using his classification system to file and search prints of arrestees. In December 1900, a British government committee (the Belper Committee) had recommended that all criminal identification records be classified by fingerprints, recognizing the method’s reliability. Once implemented, the Henry System rapidly became standard in Britain and throughout the British Empire. It was praised for its simplicity, speed, and accuracy compared to anthropometry.

Over the next few years, most English-speaking countries adopted Henry’s classification for their fingerprint bureaus. (Notably, other systems co-existed, such as Vucetich’s in Spanish-speaking nations, but Henry’s was dominant in North America and Europe.) Sir Edward Henry later published Classification and Uses of Fingerprints (1900) and is credited with institutionalizing fingerprint identification in Western law enforcement. His work, together with the contributions of Haque and Bose (who developed sub-classifications and a telegraphic code for fingerprints), provided the backbone for the vast fingerprint record systems of the 20th century.