Khan Bahadur Qazi Azizul Haque (Bengali: কাজি আজিজুল হক; 1872–1935) was a Bengali inventor and police officer in British India (present-day Bangladesh), notable for his work with Edward Henry and Hem Chandra Bose in developing the Henry Classification System of fingerprints, which is still in use. Haque provided the mathematical basis for the system.
Early life Qazi Syed Azizul Haque was born into an aristocratic Bengali Muslim family of Syeds in 1872 in the village of Paigram Kasba in Khulna District. His ancestors were appointed as Qadi in the region, as they were originally Aristocratic Bengali Hindu Kayasthas,hence the family was also known as the Qazi family of Phultala. His parents died in a boat accident when he was young, this led his household to fall into financial hardship. He was known to have been an intelligent boy from a young age, as well as for being an avaricious eater, leading him to be frequently scolded by his older brother as the household was struggling with the cost of living. One day, when his older brother returned from work, he found that he had not only eaten his share of the food but also a significant portion of his brother's food. Azizul Haque's older brother became enraged and thrashed him. Heartbroken after this incident, he secretly left his family home at the age of 12 and went to Kolkata, where he befriended a family who became impressed with his mathematical skills and arranged for him to get a formal education.
Education and police career Haque studied mathematics and science at Presidency College, Kolkata. In 1892, Edward Henry of the Calcutta Police wrote to the college principal asking for the recommendation of a strong statistics student to help with his fingerprint project, and the principal nominated Haque. Henry recruited Haque as a police sub-inspector, and initially gave him the responsibility for instituting the anthropometric system in Bengal. Haque subsequently opted to join the Bihar Police Service when Bihar was separated from the Bengal Presidency.
Fingerprinting According to author Colin Beavan, Haque, dissatisfied with the anthropometric system proposed by Francis Galton, began to work on a classification system of his own. He devised a mathematical formula to sort slips into 1024 pigeonholes in thirty-two columns and thirty-two rows based on fingerprint patterns. Beavan further writes: By 1897, Haque had collected 7000 fingerprint sets in his cabinet. His simple methods of further sub-classification, which were easier to learn and less prone to error than Galton's, meant that even a collection numbering in the hundreds of thousands could be divided into small groups of slips. As he predicted, his fingerprint sets, compared with anthropometric cards, were far less prone to error and could be classified and searched with much greater confidence. The registration of a convict or a search for his existing card took an hour under the anthropometric system, but only five minutes using Haque's classification of fingerprints. Beavan goes on to say: Haque's boss, Edward Henry saw that Haque's work would reflect well on him and asked the colonial government to convene a committee to evaluate the system for widespread use. The committee reported that fingerprints were superior to anthropometry "1. In simplicity of working; 2. In the cost of apparatus; 3. In the fact that all skilled work is transferred to a central or classification office; 4. In the rapidity with which the process can be worked; and 5. In the certainty or results. Fingerprints, in other words, were the new hero in criminal identification. (Beavan, page 142)
Credit for discovery
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