When were "fingerprints" first used for ID?

JTP, They are talking about the OLDEST USAGE of fingerprints. By saying 1896, you probably meant this??? : In 1823 Jan Evangelista Purkyně identified nine fingerprint patterns. The nine patterns include the tented arch, the loop, and the whorl, which in modern-day forensics are considered ridge details.[57] In 1840, following the murder of Lord William Russell, a provincial doctor, Robert Blake Overton, wrote to Scotland Yard suggesting checking for fingerprints.[58] In 1853 the German anatomist Georg von Meissner (1829–1905) studied friction ridges,[59] and in 1858 Sir William James Herschel initiated fingerprinting in India. In 1877 he first instituted the use of fingerprints on contracts and deeds to prevent the repudiation of signatures in Hooghly near Kolkata[60] and he registered government pensioners' fingerprints to prevent the collection of money by relatives after a pensioner's death.[61] In 1880 Henry Faulds, a Scottish surgeon in a Tokyo hospital, published his first paper on the usefulness of fingerprints for identification and proposed a method to record them with printing ink.[62] Returning to Great Britain in 1886, he offered the concept to the Metropolitan Police in London but it was dismissed at that time.[63] Up until the early 1890s police forces in the United States and on the European continent could not reliably identify criminals to track their criminal record.[64] Francis Galton published a detailed statistical model of fingerprint analysis

the answer to this question is 1896. Look it up

TrippyWraith66453, Brilliant people who were before their time !

wow who would have thought