The Truth Machine

by Geoffrey C. Bunn

  CHAPTER 6

  “Some of the darndest lies you ever heard”

  Who Invented the Lie Detector?

  “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 t
ightly and dressing in black.”20

  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.24

  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.”35 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.”39 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.”51 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.”52 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.”53 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.”