LAPPL News Watch
October 16, 2019
A decade ago, chemistry professor Paul Kelly was conducting experiments at England’s Loughborough University when he noticed his glass beakers were emerging from a vapor-filled chamber with clearly defined fingerprints on them.
The quality of the fingerprints was remarkable, and Kelly and his colleagues decided to see if their discovery could have any practical applications. They teamed up with the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence, and began exposing fingerprints on various materials to a chemical vapor, and adjusting the process to improve their results.
Kelly’s team then licensed the technique to a private company called Foster + Freeman, which built a machine called RECOVER to run the tests.
Foster + Freeman started selling it to law enforcement agencies in the United States this year and has delivered machines to about 10 of the country’s 400 public labs so far, two sources said. Lab technicians can use the machine to pull fingerprints from shell casings and other metal surfaces, like knives and from explosives.
It’s not as useful on guns themselves because they are often textured or treated to prevent corrosion, which can make it more difficult to retrieve usable prints, one expert said.
2 comments:
Superglue can do the same thing. It's been used for years.
Technology is often accidental in the beginning.
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