Page "J. Edgar Hoover" Paragraph 1

John Edgar Hoover ( January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972 ) was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI ) of the United States.

Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation — predecessor to the FBI — in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972 aged 77.

Hoover is credited with building the FBI into a large and efficient crime-fighting agency, and with instituting a number of modernizations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories.