The Truth Machine (23 page)

In an autobiographical sketch for the
Harvard Class of 1915 25th Anniversary Report,
Marston claimed he had “had the luck to discover the so-called Marston Deception Test, better known as The Lie Detector” in 1915.
²¹
His author
profile for a 1940 popular psychology article reported, “Dr. Marston has won fame as inventor of the so-called lie detector and a writer on psychological subjects.”
²²
His entry in
The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography
was also notably animated: “In 1915, he became an assistant in psychology at Radcliffe College. In the same year in the Harvard psychology laboratory he originated the systolic blood pressure test for deception, better known as the Marston ‘lie detector' test. This test, which is said to be the only officially recognized lie detector test in the world, is based primarily on the theory that deception or untruth elevates the blood pressure of the person practicing it.”
²³
In addition to crediting himself with pioneer status, Marston diminished the importance of the work of others. While his entry in the
Dictionary of Psychology,
“Lie Detection,” acknowledged Larson's work, it nevertheless asserted that the Berkeley physician “agreed essentially with Marston as to the reliability of the blood pressure test for deception if properly administered under controlled conditions by an experienced operator with suitable scientific training.” “Larson made notable contributions to test technique and apparatus,” it conceded.
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Narratives drawing on the Berkeley story invariably credit one or all three figures with the invention. This tradition ignores or minimizes Marston's contributions. Eugene Block's
Lie Detectors: Their History and Use
praised Marston only for achieving the first use of the instrument in a court of law.
²⁵
Eloise Keeler's biography of her brother Leonarde similarly neglected Marston's work, asserting that the “original lie detector … was the brainchild of Berkeley's famed chief of police, August Vollmer.”
²⁶
One historian of criminology reiterated the claim that John Larson had developed the first lie detector with Keeler's cooperation.
²⁷
“Long before the 1920s, at a time when the lie detector was only a gleam in the eye of its inventor, Dr. John A. Larson, police officers were convinced a suspect would exhibit visible signs when he was lying,” wrote the author of
Invisible Witness: The Use and Abuse of the New Technology of Crime Investigation.
²⁸
In his review of the history of “detecting the liar,” Dwight G. McCarty discussed the work of Münsterberg, Larson, and Keeler, but failed to mention Marston at all.
²⁹
Marston's name was also ignored by the author of
Police Professionalism,
who wrote that Vollmer encouraged “the development of an instrument for detecting the physiological changes that are associated with lying, known today as the polygraph.”
³⁰

But Marston is credited with the invention in histories of comic books. The entry in
The World Encyclopedia of Comics
is typical: “Marston discovered the lie detector in 1915,” it claims.
³¹
One historian of comics called Marston “the
inventor of the lie detector.”
³²
Another reported, “one of [Marston's] most memorable accomplishments was the development of the lie detector.”
³³
A more recent celebration explored Marston's relationship with the lie detector but neglected to mention any of his contemporaries.
³⁴
Another historian credited Marston with being “a key player in the development of the lie detector.”
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The casual observer could be forgiven for wondering if the lie detector was invented on the West coast by a team headed by an enthusiastic police reformer or on the East coast by a populist Harvard-trained psychologist.

Although most of the sources that attribute the invention of the lie detector to Vollmer and his “college cops” ignore or minimize the importance of Marston's work, it is clear that Vollmer himself was aware of the psychologist's early studies on the detection of deception. The “father of modern police science” was well acquainted with the literature in criminal law, criminology, and social science.
³⁶
He was also the only police chief to be on the advisory board of the
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.
³⁷
By 1921, Marston had published three academic papers of potential interest to Vollmer: “Systolic Blood Pressure Symptoms of Deception” (1917), “Reaction Time Symptoms of Deception” (1920), and “Psychological Possibilities in the Deception Tests,” the latter published in the
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
in 1921.
³⁸

Marston had concluded that a rise in blood pressure constituted a “practically infallible test of the
consciousness of an attitude of deception.”
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More specifically, he argued that “sudden sharp, short rises” of systolic blood pressure betrayed “substantial lies in an otherwise true story.”
⁴⁰
Blood pressure was measured intermittently, with a “Tycos” sphygmomanometer. The effectiveness of the test, Marston wrote, depended “almost entirely upon the construction and arrangement of the cross-examination and its proper correlation with the blood pressure readings, a system of signals between examiner and b.p. operator being necessary.” It was also important, by inserting periods of rest and “questions upon irrelevant and indifferent subjects,” to ascertain the discrepancy between the subject's normal blood pressure and “the fixed increase … due to the excitement caused by the test or by court procedure.”
⁴¹

Marston's apparatus consisted of not one, but three separate components, as the
Boston Sunday Advertiser
piece explained.
⁴²
The chronoscope was used to test reaction times during the word association test. The resulting attribution of guilt was then confirmed by the kimegraph's breathing record: “The examiner examines the record of the machine. He finds that at every word pointed out by the chronoscope as a suspicious one, the suspect's breathing has shown a marked change. For, psychologists declare, a man breathes
entirely differently when he is lying.”
⁴³
The sphygmomanometer showed whether “the suspect's blood pressure has mounted steadily during the crossexamination.” “The more he lied the higher his blood pressure has climbed. The record shows what scientists call the ‘lying curve.'” Of the three methods, the systolic blood pressure test was the most reliable, according to Marston. The effectiveness of the test, he asserted, depended almost entirely upon the construction and arrangement of the cross-examination and its correlation with the blood pressure readings. A system of signals between the examiner and operator was necessary due to the discontinuous measurement of blood pressure.

In his 1932 book,
Lying and Its Detection,
John Larson explained the difference between his and Marston's work was that whereas Marston used a discontinuous blood-pressure technique, he favored a continuous blood-pressure method.
⁴⁴
He also maintained that deception might be indicated by a lowering of pressure, not necessarily a reduction, as Marston had claimed. Apart from the measurement of blood pressure to detect deception—which was not an innovation in itself—Larson accepted none of Marston's contentions. The Berkeley “college cop” saw no reason to measure the systolic blood pressure; he reasoned that a continuous reading would be more objective than a discontinuous one; and he surmised that a lowering of pressure might also signify deception.
⁴⁵
Larson also employed measures of respiration and word association reaction time. Believing Marston's discontinuous method to be inadequate, Larson devised a test method for routine testing that, he claimed, “has remained unchanged whenever so-called polygraphs are used, the various changes being mechanical in character.” Emphasizing that the key principles had been described in academic journals from 1921, Larson added that he also obtained a time curve with a chronoscope.
⁴⁶
Because Larson's apparatus measured both blood pressure and respiration, he gave it the somewhat pedestrian title of “Cardio-Pneumo-Psychogram.”
⁴⁷

While he was anxious to take credit for the innovation of continuous blood pressure measurement, Larson magnanimously attributed the creation of the lie detector to Marston. “The real ‘lie detector,'” he wrote in the foreword to Marston's book,
The Lie Detector Test,
“is a test, a scientific procedure, originated by Dr. Marston in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory in 1915, and modified by me at Berkeley, California, beginning in 1921.”
⁴⁸
Recognizing the importance of “invention” in lie detector discourse, Larson equated the lie detector with Marston's procedures: “There is a mistaken impression abroad that a variety of ‘lie-detectors' are in common use; in fact, that every operator
who uses the one established test has ‘invented' a ‘new Lie Detector' of his own. This is not true. There is only one lie detection procedure thus far established, and I am glad to say that Marston and I agree essentially upon its fundamental points.”
⁴⁹
“The lie detector test must be used as Marston originally proposed it, and I developed its application in police investigation,” Larson concluded, “as a truly scientific procedure administered and interpreted by scientifically qualified experts.”

Although Marston later claimed that he had discovered the “Marston Systolic Blood Pressure Deception Test” in 1915, by 1921 he had yet to exclude the measurement of reaction times and breathing rates as significant indicators of deception. He had claimed that his systolic blood pressure deception test was the only scientifically recognized form of lie detector. But in 1921 he was still unsure which measure—blood pressure, respiration, or reaction time—exclusively signified guilt. In a research paper published in 1920, five years after his supposed discovery of the “only one lie detection procedure,” Marston was using as many measures as practically possible for the diagnosis of guilt: “the practical value of psychological studies in this field lies almost wholly in a complete and comprehensive scientific discovery and analysis of all the psychological symptoms of deception rather than in attempted use of one isolated set of these symptoms for detection of deception on the part of witnesses or criminals.”
⁵⁰
Marston's position indicated that the lie still retained symbolic traces of the pathological liar as the exclusive target of interest. He was still using the interpretative resource of the human kind to explain why his methods sometimes failed: “Mr. Marston divides all liars into two groups—positive and negative. Positive liars are those who are normally truthful and who, when obliged to lie, respond with difficulty. Negative liars are talented prevaricators just described… . The reactions which he will give to the innocent and crucial questions will be exactly the reverse of the answers given by the normal liar.”
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The “negative type,” Marston claimed, was “the gifted liar who would be expected to exhibit much less confusion were he lying than if he were telling the truth.”
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This type was betrayed by his rapid word association reaction times: “the only flaw in the negative type's efforts at deception lies in said efforts being
too successful.”
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Marston was therefore still somewhat committed to the concept of inherent criminality. In 1921— six years after he claimed to have discovered the one scientifically reliable principle of lie detection—he was still using the word association/reaction time method together with an analysis of the symptomatology of psychological types. In fact, because he would later afford the lie detector therapeutic
qualities, Marston would never completely repudiate his commitment to the earlier discourse of the “soul machine.”

Larson and Marston's indebtedness to the word association method, a key element of the earlier discourse of the “soul machine,” and their residual targeting of human kinds (the “feeble-minded” and other clinical cases for Larson; the “positive/negative type” of liar for Marston), indicates the importance of the historical context of any deception detecting technology. It is difficult to actually pinpoint an exact “founding moment” when the lie detector was supposedly invented because a lie detector is not merely a “machine”; it is a complex array of techniques, concepts, procedures, and symbols. By privileging the trope of invention, lie detector discourse foregrounds the hardware of instrumentation. The mysterious “black box” becomes a privileged focus of attention. The trope of invention also obscures the role that processes and techniques played in the emergence of the technology. By 1924, when magazines were beginning to credit Leonarde Keeler with the creation of the lie detector, he had stopped using the word association method, as the
Collier's
piece on the “young inventor” revealed.
⁵⁴
The “invention of the lie detector” (if this phrase retains any credibility) was partly a function of the requirement that subjects had to simply utter “yes” or “no” in response to questioning, and were no longer obliged to make timed verbal word associations.

In a 1925 article, “Every Crime Is Entrenched Behind a Lie,”
Scientific American
reported that according to the new scientific criminology, lying was the criminal's “first misstep.”
⁵⁵
“What I am proving almost every day,” reported Edward Oscar Heinrich, consulting criminologist of Berkeley, California, “is that crime is entrenched behind a lie; puncture the lie and the criminal is disclosed.” There followed a description of methods for exposing devious criminal practices such as photomicrography, ballistics, and chemical analysis. By the 1920s, psychometrics, statistics, sociology, and genetics had demolished the barrier criminal anthropology had erected between the normal and the abnormal. Criminology was now interested in deception on its own terms, rather than as a symptom of an underlying mental pathology. Up until the 1890s, under the influence of a biological approach to crime, criminology sought to “diagnose crime” or “detect the criminal.”
⁵⁶
The facially disfigured criminal of the 1890s had, by the 1920s, escaped from the clinic and returned to the population to become but a faceless and anonymous member of society.