30, 20, and 10 Years Ago in OPN

“The dawn of laser use in the forensic community began in the late 1970s when [Richard] Menzel, then a spectroscopist with Xerox, was asked by a colleague if a laser could be used to detect a fingerprint. ‘I thought it was a silly question, but I absolutely had to look into it,’ recalls Menzel. Using argon and copper vapor lasers to stimulate fluorescence of fingerprints pre-treated with Superglue, Menzel provided the first evidence that lasers could be a valuable tool to the forensic community.”