The Truth Machine (22 page)

“The truth can literally be tapped,” explained “Craig Kennedy, Scientific Detective,” “even where no confession can be extracted.” “The Truth Detector,” 1910. Frontispiece, Arthur B. Reeve,
The War Terror
(New York: Harper & Bros., 1915). Digitized by UCSD.

The writers of detective pulp fiction accorded the technology a reliability the scientists were reluctant to condone. Fiction writers deployed an enormous range of technologies to detect deception, from reaction time to respiration rates and from galvanometers to pulsometers. Jacques Futrelle's detective used the simple technique of measuring pulse to unmask the culprit in his short story “The Motor Boat” (1906).
¹¹⁵
In Charles Walk's
The Yellow Circle
(1909), a character proposes giving a word association test to a butler he suspects of theft: “The chap must say the first word that pops into his mind, suggested by the word you gave him; the machine measures the interval of thought, and if there is nothing to interfere with the association of ideas, the chap will answer prompt the first word that your word suggests. Hesitation
signifies equivocation.”
¹¹⁶
In Arthur Reeve's story “The Lie Detector” (1915), Craig Kennedy described a “psychophysical test for falsehood” based on the inspiration-expiration ratio. “Lying,” he explained, “when it is practiced by an expert, is not easily detected by the most careful scrutiny of the liar's appearance and manner.” But successful means had been developed for the detection of falsehood by the study of experimental psychology. These effects were “unerring, unequivocal. The utterance of a false statement increases respiration; of a true statement decreases… .This is a certain and objective criterion … between truth and falsehood. Even when a clever liar endeavors to escape detection by breathing irregularly, it is likely to fail… . You see, the quotient obtained by dividing the time of inspiration by the time of expiration gives me the result.”
¹¹⁷
Cleveland Moffett's (1909) novel
Through the Wall
featured one Dr. Duprat using a “pneumatic arrangement” to recognize the mental states of criminals, “especially any emotional disturbances connected with fear, anger or remorse.”
¹¹⁸
“Every nation in the world has, at some time or other, had its ordeals for the detection of guilt,” a lawyer tells a jury in Melvin L. Severy's novel
The Mystery of June 13th
(1905). “Several instruments may be used for this purpose, among them the cardiograph, kymograph, hemadynamometer, sphygmograph, sphygmophone and hematachometer.”
¹¹⁹

From around 1904 to the First World War, such instruments fascinated novelists, journalists, and scientists alike. A type of person invariably resided at the center of the scientific discourse: the insane patient, the habitual criminal, the eugenically unfit degenerate, the feeble-minded child. In Münsterberg's case the target was indeed a liar—but one in search of a cure for the deeper ills that rendered him untrustworthy. For the scientists the aim was to uncover the correlates of criminality within the criminal self, to assess the depth of depravity with a view to treating it.
¹²⁰
The novelists, journalists, and writers of detective pulp fiction, however, were interested in the pragmatic and plot-driven question as to which, among many apparently innocent and ostensibly normal suspects, was guilty. Unlike criminal anthropology, which had amassed its resources around the most degenerate suspect, pulp fiction privileged the person that everyone least suspected. To a considerable extent, the lie detector was an invention of those fiction writers for whom the key issue was simply the presence or absence of guilt within one individual among many. The lie detector, that great twentieth century legend, was quintessentially a byproduct of the whodunit. It materialized not from the laboratory but from the story.

“There's a contrivance recently invented by some college
professor,” said he, “that I'd like to try on Cullimore. It is a lie
detector; with its aid one can plumb the bottomless pits of a
chap's subconscious mind, and fathom all the mysteries of his
subliminal ego. You set some wheels going, the chap lays his
hands on a what-you-call-'em, and then you proceed to fire some
words at him. It is like a game.”

—Charles Walk,
The Yellow Circle
(1909)

“What electric investigative device was invented by Nova Scotiaborn John Augustus Larson in 1921?”

—Trivial Pursuit
question (ca. 1996)

According to the popular general knowledge game
Trivial Pursuit,
John Augustus Larson invented the lie detector in 1921. The question appears to be simple, the answer clear-cut. The American press certainly considered the issue unproblematic: “The ‘lie-detector' machine that records tell-tale changes in heart action and breathing accompanying deception,”
Survey
magazine reported in 1929, “was invented by Dr. John A. Larson in 1921.”
¹
A 1922
San Francisco Examiner
article was titled “Inventor of Lie Detector Traps Bride”: “Dr. John Augustus Larsen [sic] … has lately emerged upon the stage of fame as the inventor of the sphyg—sphygomanom—call it the ‘lie-detector.'”
²
Larson's lie detector was an “interesting device, with great possibilities” according to
The Literary Digest
in 1931, “yet even its inventor regards it as not yet perfected.”
³
Reviewing the history and development of the lie detector in
1938, Larson himself tacitly confirmed that indeed it was he who had invented the instrument in 1921.
⁴

Although the historical record thus provides some evidence to support
Trivial Pursuit's
contention, the game's question-setters nevertheless chose to privilege one candidate for inventor status over others. In a 1932 feature, “Science Trails The Criminal,”
Scientific American
printed a photograph of “The designer, Mr. Leonarde Keeler, of the polygraph or so-called “lie-detector” giving a demonstration of a deception test.”
⁵
In 1933, the
New York Times
reported that “Leonarde Keeler, 29-year-old inventor of the lie detector, “had been presented with an award for making a most outstanding civic contribution to Chicago.
⁶
The
Review of Reviews
praised Keeler for being “one of the first scientists to see the possibilities of the polygraph lie-detector, claiming that “no more important invention has ever been made for successfully dealing with crime in the whole course of criminal science.”
⁷
Implying that the instrument was Berkeley police chief August Vollmer's innovation, however,
Outlook and Independent
in 1929 spoke of “the Vollmer pneumo-cardio-sphygmometer, or ‘lie-detector.'”
⁸
In March 1937, the
New York Times
asserted that Leonarde Keeler was “the “inventor of the detector, scientifically known as a polygraph,”
⁹
but seven months later it named William Moulton Marston as the “inventor of the lie-detector.”
¹⁰

The historical record reveals numerous claimants to the title. As Marston perceptively remarked, in fact, there were almost as many inventors of the lie detector “as there were monks, in the old days, who claimed to possess a piece of the true cross.”
¹¹
During the early period of the machine's development, there was no consensus as to who had actually invented the device— although almost everyone agreed that the issue of invention was pertinent. The ambition of this chapter, however, is not to arbitrate between the various competing claims in order to locate the “true” inventor. Instead, it will address two fundamental issues. First, I argue that it is not legitimate to credit the “invention” of the lie detector to a single individual. Second, I explore how, despite being a myth, invention has nevertheless played a constructive role throughout the instrument's history.

If a lie detector is defined as an instrument used to record the physiological reactions of a nonpathological subject, then such an instrument was first described in Balmer and MacHarg's inaugural Luther Trant story, “The Man in the Room”
(Hampton's Magazine,
May 1909). The plot of this story is recapitulated in Arthur Reeve's first Craig Kennedy story, “The Case of Helen
Bond”
(Cosmopolitan,
December 1910). In both stories a young female suspect is subjected to a word association/reaction time test using either a “pendulum chronoscope” or a “plethysmograph.” From these sources—described by one commentator as “blood relations, if not twins”—one set in Chicago, the other in New York, fact has followed fiction in the form of two parallel narratives that tell the story of the invention of the lie detector.
¹²
While the first begins in Berkeley, later moving to Chicago, with the work of John Larson, Leonarde Keeler, and August Vollmer, the second has its origins in Boston and features one man, William Moulton Marston. While the former is a tale of the practical concerns of a professionalizing police force, the latter is the story of an academic psychologist who gradually made a transition into the public domain.

In April 1924,
Current Opinion
reported on a “painless method of enforced confession.”
¹³
Professor John A. Larson “of the University of California and consulting crime expert of the police department of Berkeley, California” had “perfected an instrument for ‘nailing the lie.'” The idea was “based on the fact that under the excitement of questioning, heartbeats and breathing cannot be controlled.” Another article about the lie detector appeared in
Collier's
magazine that August.
¹⁴
“The Future Looks Dark for Liars,” it announced, “For Those Scientific Men Now Have a Lie Detector That Actually Works.” The author, Frederick Collins, asked Dr. Charles Sloan of the
Los Angeles Times
to explain the workings of the instrument. It “is based on two well-known methods of registering human impulses,” he said: the sphygmomanometer and the pneumograph: “That's the way the lie detector works, the way it is working in Chief Vollmer's campaign against Los Angeles's highly advertised crime wave.” The machine's sponsors were Dr. Herman M. Adler, Dr. John Larson, and their “star pupil,” Leonarde Keeler.
¹⁵
In spite of his achievements, Keeler was only twenty years old and still a student. “‘The first model of the lie detector—I call it the emotiograph—was very crude,'” “the youthful inventor” explained. “It occupied a whole table six feet in length.”
Collier's
attributed the creation of the instrument to the team of Larson, Vollmer, and Keeler. Berkeley Police Department chief of police August Vollmer was the most senior of the three. He was a tireless campaigner, an important influence on the transformation of the American police from a low-status, disorganized, and incompetent body of men, into an institution for which values of professional crime fighting and serving the community were paramount.
¹⁶

“New Machine Detects Liars,” announced the
Boston Sunday Advertiser
in May 1921. “Registers Emotions Scientifically; Traps Shrewdest Criminals.” Reprinted by permission of
Boston Sunday Advertiser /
Hearst Corporation.

In 1938 the psychologist William Moulton Marston offered an alternative account of the origins in
The Lie Detector Test.
¹⁷
Marston wanted posterity to credit him with the development of the deception test, as his immodest entry in the
Encyclopedia of American Biography
evidenced: “the remarkable thing is that he discovered his ‘Lie Detector' while still an undergraduate, while all the big psychologists of the world had been trying to get a practical test for deception for the last fifty years.”
¹⁸
Marston cited a
Boston Sunday Advertiser
article from May 1921 to support his claim to priority. “New Machine Detects Liars,” it trumpeted, “Registers Emotions Scientifically; Traps Shrewdest Criminals.”
¹⁹
“Successful lying will soon be a lost art,” the article began: “William Moulton Marston, Boston lawyer-scientist, inventor of the psychological lie-detector, which he put forward in 1913 and has since greatly improved, has already sprinkled the way of the transgressor with thorns from Massachusetts to California. No matter how accomplished at ordinary deception a man may be, he cannot hope to deceive Mr. Marston's apparatus any more than a woman can humbug a weighing machine by lacing tightly and dressing in black.”
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