Edmund Locard

“Physical evidence cannot be wrong, it cannot perjure itself, it cannot be wholly absent.” by Edmond Locard. Edmond Locard was born in Lyon, France in 1877 and was soon studying medicine, in which he earned the degree for in 1902. During his study of medicine he developed a love for science and how it may apply to legal matters. He wrote a thesis on Legal Medicine under the Great King, and eventually wrote over 40 pieces of work, the most famous being his seven part series Treaty of Criminalistics. Mr. Locard soon became a french criminalist known to be a pioneer of forensic science and to be the ‘Sherlock Holmes of France’. Locard worked as an assistant to Alexandre Lacassagne, who regularly participated in criminal cases in France at the time and to soon become the first to try to match bullets to the barrel of the gun it was fired from. In 1907 Locard passed his Bar exam, a test that is used to determine if one is qualified to practice law. After that he went on to study alongside Mr. Alphonse Bertillon, a famous archaeologist for his anthropometric system of identifying criminals. Locard then went to travel the world visiting police departments in Germany, Italy and the United States in New York and Chicago. In 1910 Locard returned to Lyon, France where he convinced the police department to allow him to build the first crime lab, which was built in the attic of the court house. His lab was not recognized by the police department until 1912. So in 1912 Locard became the first head of a police crime lab.
During the first World War, which started in 1914, Locard worked for the French Secret Service as a medical examiner, who determined cause and location of a soldier or prisoners death based on their clothing. In 1929 in Lausanne, Switzerland Locard along with Marc Bischoff, Siegfried Trkel, C. J. van Ledden Huselbousch, Georg Popp founded the International Academy of Criminalists. Unfortunately the Academy did not survive World War 2 but it