🎧 FORENSICS: Fingerprinting
🎧 Patented: History of Inventions • 39m
We take you to London’s most inaccessible museum, the Met police’s Crime Museum, and back to India in the time of the British Raj. We hear about the first murder case ever to hinge on fingerprint evidence.
No one had to invent fingerprints. They’ve been around for ages…But to be able to use fingerprints in fighting crime required an obsessive colonial administrator, hard science and the invention of an ingenious filing system that would revolutionise policing around the world.
Our guests today are Chandak Sengoopta, historian at Birkbeck University and author of Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting was Born in Colonial India and Paul Bickley, curator of the Crime Museum housed in New Scotland Yard.
This is the second episode in a mini-series we’re bringing you all about the invention of Forensics. Next week it’s Lie Detectors.
Produced by Freddy Chick
Executive Producer is Charlotte Long
Up Next in 🎧 Patented: History of Inventions
-
🎧 Perfume
First Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel shocked the world’s eyeballs with her fashion designs. Then she shocked its nostrils with a new smell - Chanel No. 5.
“It’s punk rock but with feather boas and fragrance”. That’s how today’s guest, Suzy Nightingale, describes the impact that Coco Chanel had on soci...
-
🎧 FORENSICS: the beginning
Death by tiger bites. Death by prodding. Death from sexual excess. Deaths from over-eating and over-drinking. The opening of graves.
These are a few of the chapter headings in a 13th century Chinese book called ‘The Washing Away of Wrongs’. It is a compendium of grizzly, gory, bizarre murders an...
-
🎧 PowerPoint
We take PowerPoint for granted. It's as much a fact of life as concrete. Or rainy afternoons. But it hasn’t always been here. It has a story. And once you’ve heard it, you’ll never look at PowerPoint the same way again.
Those old enough can remember the world before PowerPoint. A world where pre...