A History of Biometric Fingerprints
These days, biometric technology is used in a wide range of applications involving security and identity verification. Biometric Fingerprints have been used for a very, very long time. Fingerprints where apparently used to seal business transactions on to clay tablets. They have been used to sign documents in Ancient China and have been used to solve crimes since the late 19th century. Quite notably, matching fingerprints was once a very labor intensive task that only fairly recently, thanks to computer technology, has become quite fast and routine and relatively free form any kind of hassles. For more on the history of fingerprints and biometrics, there are a lot of good online resources available.