The Truth Machine

by Geoffrey C. Bunn

  Goddard proposed that feebleminded criminality could be detected through the deciphering of stigmata or other physical means. Criminality was an invisible problem, one that could only be revealed through psychological testing and family genealogies. Secrecy, appropriately, was a major theme of Goddard’s popular books, which foregrounded the difficulties involved in penetrating appearances to reveal underlying realities.86 For a while after 1910 Goddard was the most influential criminologist in the United States, the national expert on the causes of crime.87 By collapsing upper-grade feeblemindedness and moral imbecility into the single category of the “moron,” he delivered the “coup de grace to criminal anthropology.”88 Even so, because of its commitment to defective human kinds, the Vineland Training School could never have been the place where the lie detector was invented, even if it did help to consolidate some of the conditions for the instrument’s later emergence. The lie detector could not materialize in a setting where criminality remained conflated with feeblemindedness, degeneration, hereditary defect, or any other form of inherent psychopathology.

  A paradigm shift was imminent. “There is No Criminal Type,” the New York Times announced in November 1913 in a full page article: “In other words the criminal is a normal person, not markedly different from the rest of humanity who have managed to keep out of prison. In other words, there are in ministers and Cambridge undergraduates and college professors the making of pickpockets and thieves, as well as murderers and forgers.”89 The article was a detailed account of Charles Goring’s The English Convict, the book that, according to the historian of criminality Arthur Fink, “was more decisive perhaps than any other factor in undermining belief in a criminal anthropological type.”90 Other factors challenging the notion of the born criminal included William Healy’s intensive study of a thousand delinquents (1915), the psychometric testing of over a million American army recruits in 1917, aetiological findings produced by the case study method of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and, as we have already seen, the development of a sociological approach to crime.91 Fink dated the end of criminal anthropology in the United States to 1915, the year in which the term “lie detector” was first coined. By then, he concluded, the study of crime “had come a long way from the time when the madman was indistinguishable from the criminal, from the time when it was held that the shape of the skull or of the brain determined criminal or non-criminal behaviour, from the time when it was believed that there was a fixed criminal anthropological type … when it was asserted that every feeble-minded person was a criminal or a potential criminal.”92 It was also in 1915 that a “Psychology Squad” was established to advise the New York Police Department on “how to differentiate mental defectives from crooks.”93

  “Composite Portrait of 30 Criminals. From Actual Photographs.” Detail from “‘There is No Criminal Type,’ A decisive break with the past: Dr. Charles Goring, deputy medical officer, His Majesty’s Prison, London declares that ‘the criminal is a normal person, not markedly different from the rest of humanity.’” New York Times, November 2, 1913.

  The writers of scientific detective pulp fiction, a popular American art form during the first half of the twentieth century, had long been at ease with the idea that there was no such thing as an inherently criminal type. This set them apart from the scientists about whose work they were reading in the newspapers.94 They had also drawn inspiration from the fin-de-siècle Gothic novels that had critiqued criminology’s central claims. A considerable influence on the form and style of the scientific detective stories, Sherlock Holmes embodied the breakdown of the barrier between the normal and the pathological that scientific criminology had tried so hard to establish. Following Holmes’s lead, other pulp fiction detectives quickly acquired personal scientific laboratories.95 Science and technology considerably influenced turn-of-the-century dime novels like Nick Carter Weekly, for example, a serial that made extensive use of X-ray machines, photographs, telephones, and microscopes. No wonder then that it was from within scientific detective pulp fiction that the lie detector finally emerged.

  During the ten years preceding the outbreak of the First World War, a variety of new scientific detective characters emerged in mass circulation magazines. Their personas evolved from professors and doctors through psychologists and onto criminologists, in many cases adapting the latest piece of scientific equipment toward crime-fighting ends.96 Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke, a medico-legal expert, whose adventures spanned 1907 to 1942, was the creation of R. Austin Freeman, an ear, nose, and throat specialist. A disavowal of the compromised and neurotic fin-de-siècle Gothic medical man, Thorndyke was often described as having a very un-Lombrosoian “symmetrical” face. He had little to do with the corrupt discourse of homo criminalis, standing out “like a tower of stone,” erect and energetic, radiating dignity and force of character. His creator saw no reason to make his detective ugly or eccentric, both of which signified problems of the psyche.97 Freeman’s adversaries and colleagues were derived from his archetype: professional, dependable, inventive. His sidekick was the omnicompetent Nathaniel Polton, a laboratory assistant, chemist, and photographic specialist who could build anything from an astronomical clock to a microscope. Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence (1908) was a “Physician Extraordinary”; William Hope Hodgson’s Carnaki (1910) “a Psychic Investigator”; Max Rittenberg’s Dr. Xavier Wycherley (1911) “a professional psychologist and mental healer who detects on the side.”98

  But it is Luther Trant, America’s “first scientific detective,” who warrants a special mention in any history of the lie detector. Created in 1909 by Edwin Balmer and William MacHarg, two Chicago newspapermen, Trant’s success was attributed to “the tried and accepted experiments of modern scientific psychology.” Luther Trant, his name an anagram of “Learnt Truth,” “humps his muscles against statistical deviations and is enthralled by response times and correlation factors.” Trant used galvanometers, pneumographs, plethysmographs, and chronoscopes to measure physical response to emotional stress and so unmask miscreants.99 Balmer and MacHarg’s first Trant story, “The Man in the Room,” which appeared in Hampton’s Magazine in May 1909, had Trant arguing that psychological testing must be applied to civil criminal cases and not left as laboratory demonstrations. This story features an early example of psychophysical testing of a nonpathological subject to uncover guilty knowledge rather than demonstrate inherent criminality. At the beginning, Trant praises his mentor, Professor Reiland, for passing on his knowledge of “the cardiograph, by which the effect upon the heart of every act and passion can be read as a physician reads the pulse chart of his patient; the pneumograph, which traces the minutest meaning of the breathing; the galvanometer, that wonderful instrument which, though a man hold every feature and muscle passionless as death, will betray him through the sweat glands in the palms of his hands.” He had also been taught “how a man not seen to stammer or hesitate, in perfect control of his speech and faculties, must surely show through his thought associations, which he cannot know he is betraying, the marks that any important act and every crime must make indelibly upon his mind.”100 In this first story, Trant uses a “pendulum chronoscope,” a voice-actuated device that measures the delay between a word spoken and the response of the testee.101

  In “The Fast Watch” (June, 1909), Trant uses some banana oil and a galvanometer to break an alibi. “The Man Higher Up” (September 1909) was reprinted in both Amazing Stories (December 1926) and Scientific Detective Monthly (February 1930) during the brief recapitulation of the scientific detective genre in the early 1930s. The cover of the latter shows a worried-looking suspect (“The Boss”) attached to the instrument while Trant and assorted white-coated scientists look on. Bearing a vague resemblance to Hugo Münsterberg, a German psychologist called “Professor Kuno Schmalz” helps Trant to use a plethysmograph and a pneumograph to detect guilt. It is significant that the chief suspect in this story—which also features the first appearance of the image of three simultan
eous physiological traces on a chart—is a white-collar company boss, a criminal with no taint of psychopathic deviancy.102 In “The Eleventh Hour” (February 1910), Trant uses the electric psychometer (referred to as “the soul machine”) to expose a sinister oriental execution plot. The galvanometer is connected to a lamp while a mirror spectacularly projects the suspect’s guilt onto the wall for all to see. Balmer and MacHarg were anxious to emphasize that the instruments they were describing, although “little known to the general public,” were “precisely such as are being used daily in the psychological laboratories of the great universities — both in America and Europe — by means of which modern men of science are at last disclosing and defining the workings of that oldest of worldmysteries—the human mind.” Experiments in university laboratories had evidently established that “the resistance of the human body to a weak electric current varies when the subject is frightened or undergoes emotion; and the consequent variation in the strength of the current, depending directly upon the amount of emotional disturbance, can be registered by the galvanometer for all to see.” Luther Trant did not invent anything new, the authors explained, he merely adapted the accepted experiments of modern scientific psychology. He may have been “a character of fiction; but his methods are matters of fact.” Implying that they had pioneered a new use for the technology, Balmer and MacHarg claimed that the instruments had previously been employed merely to diagnose madness: “If these facts are not used as yet except in the academic experiments of the psychological laboratories and the very real and useful purpose to which they have been put in the diagnosis of insanities, it is not because they are incapable of wider use.”103 As Trant put it, “I have merely made some practical applications of simple psychological experiments, which should have been put into police procedure years ago.”104 He “read from the marks made upon minds by a crime,” he explained, “not from scrawls and thumbprints upon paper … But by the authority of the new science—the new knowledge of humanity—which he was laboring to establish.”105 “Instead of analyzing evidence by the haphazard methods of the courts,” Trant explained, “we can analyze it scientifically, exactly, incontrovertibly—we can select infallibly the truth from the false.”106

  Serialized mass circulation magazines were tailor-made for the “whodunit” plot structure in which a number of suspects were initially considered equally likely to have committed a crime. Pretty young women, delicate and flawless in appearance, often became prime suspects, much to the surprise of onlookers. Criminal anthropology’s crude concept of the born criminal was much less suited to this narrative format. In Arthur Reeve’s first Craig Kennedy story, “The Case of Helen Bond” (December 1910), the suspect is described as “the ideal type of ‘new’ woman—tall and athletic, yet without any affectation of mannishness … her dark hair and large brown eyes and the tan of many suns on her face and arms betokened anything but the neurasthenic. One felt instinctively that she was, with all her athletic grace, primarily a womanly woman.”107 In “The Crimeometer” (December 1912), the psychologist-turned-detective was anxious to rule out hereditary defects such as epilepsy or “abnormal conformation of the head” before submitting the suspect to a truth test. The galvanometer “psychometer” is described as “an actual working fact. No living man can conceal his emotions from the uncanny instrument. He may bring the most gigantic of will-powers into play to conceal his inner feelings and the psychometer will record the very work which he makes this will-power do.” In the Luther Trant story “Eleventh Hour” (February 1910), Balmer and MacHarg explicitly repudiated racial typologies with a plot that had Trant test four Chinese suspects. “You can’t get anything out of a Chinaman! Inspector Walker will tell you that!” says an attending detective. “I know Siler, that it is absolutely hopeless to expect a confession from a Chinaman,” Trant replies, “they are so accustomed to control the obvious signs of fear, guilt, the slightest trace or hint of emotion, even under the most rigid examination, that it had come to be regarded as a characteristic of the race. But the new psychology does not deal with those obvious signs; it deals with the involuntary reactions in the blood and glands which are common to all men alike—even to Chinamen!”108

  Arthur Reeve created “Craig Kennedy, Scientific Detective,” while he was still an undergraduate at Princeton University. He had read a series of articles of scientific crime detection while working as a journalist on The Survey (1907).109 His aim for the character, he later recalled, was to combine “science and law in a Nick Carter who should have both the University and Third Avenue melodrama in his make-up.”110 The first Craig Kennedy series ran in Cosmopolitan, the magazine Münsterberg had also written for, from December 1910 to October 1912. It became enormously successful and ran in pulp fiction titles such as Amazing Detective Tales and Scientific Detective Monthly until 1935.111 Reeves’ plots featured a large number of suspects but very few indepth character descriptions. His narratives often pivoted not on assaying the depth of the depravity of one particular criminal but rather on the question which, among many apparent innocents, was culpable.112 The new technologies could assist the psychologically-informed detective to uncover the truth. In “The Truth Detector” (1910), Kennedy explained that the pneumograph “shows the actual intensity of the emotions by recording their effects on the heart and lungs together. The truth can literally be tapped, even where no confession can be extracted. A moment’s glance at this line, traced here by each of you, can tell the expert more than words.”113

  In the first Kennedy story, “The Case of Helen Bond,” the suspect is subjected to a deception test using a plethysmograph and a word association test: “She smiled languidly, as he adjusted a long, tightly fitting rubber glove on her shapely forearm and then encased it in a larger, absolutely inflexible covering of leather. Between the rubber glove and the leather covering was a liquid communicating by a glass tube with a sort of dial. Craig had often explained to me how the pressure of the blood was registered most minutely on the dial, showing the varied emotions as keenly as if you had taken a peep into the very mind of the subject. I think the experimental psychologists called the thing a ‘plethysmograph.’” Reeve also equipped Kennedy with “a very delicate stop-watch” for measuring association time. “Neither of us was unfamiliar with the process,” asserted Kennedy’s sidekick, a newspaper reporter, “for when we were in college these instruments were just coming into use in America. Kennedy had never let his particular branch of science narrow him, but had made a practice of keeping abreast of all the important discoveries and methods in other fields. Besides, I had read articles about the chronoscope, the plethysmograph, the sphygmograph, and others of the new psychological instruments. Craig carried it off, however, as if he did that sort of thing as an every-day employment.”114

  “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.