History of Hair and Fiber Analysis

The first use of medical crime solving is traced to a Chinese book, written by Song Ci in 1248, titled “Collected Cases of Injustice Rectified.”
An English legal case in 1784 matched a torn piece of paper recovered from a bullet wound in the victim's head with another piece of paper, which led to a conviction. In the 19th century, forensic medicine was a recognized branch of medicine. By 1910, Edmond Locard, a French criminologist, formulated the basic forensic principle, which states: "Every contact leaves a trace,” and established the world's first crime laboratory.

France’s Francois Goron was one of the first investigators to try to use hair to identify a murderer. But in his first case, hairs found in a dead woman's hand could not be identified as human because the scientific community could not yet distinguish between animal and human hair. Later in 1899, Goron tried again and was able to establish that a murder victim's hair had been dyed, which eventually led to the arrest of the killer and successfully using forensic hair tests to solve a crime.

http://www.ehow.com/about_6723036_history-hair-forensics.html