What Sparked the need for Fingerprints?

Although they look the same and bear the same name, the two prisoners in the photo are different people, and their achievements helped usher in the era of fingerprint recognition.
The man on the left is named Will West and the man on the right is William West, both imprisoned in Leavenworth, Kansas, over 100 years ago. The arrival of Will West in 1903 angered the jailers. the jailer was sure he had cured him two years ago.
clerk, M.V. McClugree asked Will West if he had ever been to prison. West refused.
McClaury then began performing the Bertillon measurement, named after the French police officer Alphonse Bertillon. This measurement is a common way to identify people and record measurements of key physical characteristics. McClaury, who believed the man even before he was imprisoned, looked up his name in the files and found a picture of William West who looked exactly like Will West in every way.
They even shared the same Bertillon measurements. However, Will West insisted that McClagrie was not him.

To McClagrie's horror, he was also right. William West was a completely different person and had been convicted of murder two years earlier. This case exposed the flaws in Bertillon's methods, and American authorities soon began to take fingerprints.
The pioneer was Scotland Yard Sgt. John C. Ferrier was born in 1904 in St. I met McClaury while guarding the Crown Jewels on tour at the World's Fair in St. Louis. He told American prison guards how Scotland Yard had been using fingerprints for the past three years and preached about their accuracy.
McClaughry was sold and, after learning the trade, was imprisoned in Leavenworth Prison. Soon after, the nation's first national fingerprint repository was established.
The use of fingerprints began in 1858, when Sir William James Herschel, the Chief Justice of Hooghly District in Jungipur, India, asked locals to sign business contracts with the palm of their hand. But he didn't do it because he knew the science, but because he thought it was a good way to identify someone.