Archive Gallery: Science Solves Crimes
August 1931 How earographs, invisible ink detectors, and the famed "Stamp Detective" used science to catch unsuspecting crooks. There's something timeless about a good detective story. At the end of a long day, it's nice to know that the clues check out, the crooks get caught, and everyone goes home happy. During the early 1930s, Popular Science capitalized on the mystery genre by running a series of articles detailing how the modern detective incorporates science into crime detection. We were enthralled by scientists who could trace a bullet to its weapon simply by examining it under a microscope. We were thrilled that a person's gender and age could be determined from a single strand of hair. Click to launch the photo gallery. Nowadays, we're so used to seeing forensics dramatized on TV that we take criminology for granted, but for a generation raised on Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and...