The Truth Machine
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7. William A. Dyche, “Science in the Detection of Crime,” The Review of Reviews, January 1932, 52–54.
8. “Lie Detecting,” Outlook and Independent 153, 1929, 533.
9. “Lie Detector Seals Doom of Murderer,” New York Times, March 2, 1937, 44.
10. “Marston Advises 3 L’s for Success,” New York Times, November 11, 1937, 27.
11. William Moulton Marston, The Lie Detector Test (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1938), 18.
12. Robert Sampson, Yesterday’s Faces: A Study of Series Characters in the Early Pulp Magazines. Vol. 2, Strange Days (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1984), 27.
13. “Science Devises a Painless “3rd Degree,’” Current Opinion 76, April 1924, 474.
14. Frederick L. Collins, “The Future Looks Dark for Liars,” Collier’s, August 16, 1924, 7, 26.
15. Ibid., 7.
16. Gene E. Carte and Elaine H. Carte, Police Reform in the United States: The Era of August Vollmer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 2.
17. Marston, The Lie Detector Test.
18. “Marston, William Moulton,” Encyclopedia of American Biography, n.s. 7 (New York: The American Historical Society, 1937), 23.
19. Marvin S. Bowman, “New Machine Detects Liars,” Boston Sunday Advertiser, May 8, 1921, B3.
20. Ibid.
21. “William Moulton Marston,” Harvard Class of 1915 25th Annual Report (Pusey Library, Harvard University Archives, 1940), 480–81.
22. William Moulton Marston, “Have a Vacation Every Day,” The Rotarian 56, January 1940, 26.
23. “Marston, William Moulton,” The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Current Volume, E, 1937–38 (New York: James T. White and Co., 1938), 29.
24. William Moulton Marston, “Lie Detection: Its Bodily Basis and Test Procedure,” in Encyclopedia of Psychology, ed. Philip Lawrence Harriman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), 358.
25. Eugene B. Block. Lie Detectors: Their History and Use (New York: David McKay Co., 1977), chap 4.
26. Eloise Keeler, The Lie Detector Man: The Career and Cases of Leonarde Keeler (Boston: Telshare Publishing, 1984), 2.
27. Fred E. Inbau, “Scientific Crime Detection: Early Efforts in Chicago,” an oral history conducted in 1972 by Gene Carte, in August Vollmer: Pioneer in Police Professionalism, Vol. 2. (Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1983), 6.
28. William W. Turner, Invisible Witness: The Use and Abuse of the New Technology of Crime Investigation (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1968), 33.
29. Dwight G. McCarty, “Detecting the Liar,” chap. 12 in Psychology and the Law (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1960).
30. Thomas J. Deakin, Police Professionalism: The Renaissance of American Law Enforcement (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1988), 98.
31. “Marston, William Moulton (1893–1947),” in The World Encyclopedia of Comics, ed. Maurice Horn, 2 vols. (New York: Chelsea House Publishers), 480–81.
32. Trina Robbins, The Great Women Superheroes (Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1996), 4.
33. Jim Korkis, “William Moulton Marston,” Comic Book Marketplace 23 (1995): 46.
34. Les Daniels, Wonder Woman: The Complete History (London: Titan Books, 2000). Echoes of Marston’s claim to priority are evident in his son’s recent comments: “I know there was some controversy as to whether he was the first to discover the relationship [between blood pressure and lying], but he did much basic research and had developed a crude working apparatus while still at Harvard” (12).
35. Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book (London: William Heinemann, 2005), 206.
36. See, for example, Vollmer’s proposed syllabus for the Berkeley School of Police: A. Vollmer and A. Schneider, “The School for Police as Planned at Berkeley,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 7, no. 6 (1917): 877–98.
37. Gene Carte, “Introduction,” in August Vollmer: Pioneer in Police Professionals, Vol. 2, viii.
38. William Moulton Marston, “Systolic Blood Pressure Symptoms of Deception,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 2 (1917): 117–63; William Moulton Marston, “Reaction Time Symptoms of Deception,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 3 (1920): 72–87; and William Moulton Marston, “Psychological Possibilities in the Deception Tests,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 11 (1921): 551–70.
39. Marston, “Systolic Blood Pressure Symptoms,” 162.
40. Ibid., 163.
41. Marston, “Psychological Possibilities in the Deception Tests.”
42. Bowman, “New Machine Detects Liars,” B3.
43. Ibid.
44. John A. Larson, Lying and its Detection: A Study of Deception and Deception Tests (Glen Ridge: Patterson Smith, 1932), 261–62 (emphasis added).
45. In 1938, Marston claimed that he had initially employed a continuous measure of blood pressure, but he later “gave up the continuous record because I believed constant pressure on the subject’s arm altered his blood pressure.” Marston, The Lie Detector Test, 98.
46. John A. Larson, “The Lie Detector: Its History and Development,” 894.
47. John A. Larson, “The Cardio-Pneumo-Psychogram and Its Use in the Study of the Emotions, with Practical Application,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 5 (1922): 323–28. Keeler would later describe his polygraph as a “pneumo-cardio-sphygmo-galvanograph.” Leonarde Keeler, “Debunking the ‘Lie-Detector,’” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science 25 (1934–35): 157.
48. John A. Larson, “Introduction,” in Marston, The Lie Detector Test.
49. Ibid.
50. William Moulton Marston, “Reaction Time Symptoms of Deception,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 3 (1920): 72–87.
51. Bowman, “New Machine Detects Liars,” B3.
52. Marston, “Reaction Time Symptoms of Deception,” 87.
53. Ibid., 83.
54. Collins, “The Future Looks Dark for Liars.”
55. Tom White, “Every Crime Is Entrenched Behind a Lie,” Scientific American 133, 1925, 298–99.
56. “Transmission of Criminal Traits,” The Green Bag 3, 1891, 215–16; Edmund R. Spearman, “Criminals and Their Detection,” The New Review 9, 1893, 65–84; Sanger Brown, “Responsibility in Crime from the Medical Standpoint,” The Popular Science Monthly 46, 1894–95, 154–64.
57. “Inventor of Lie Detector Traps Bride,” quoted in Ken Alder, The Lie Detectors, 11.
58. “Machine Tests Veracity,” New York Times, June 11, 1922, 5.
59. “Science Devises a Painless ‘3rd Degree’”; Collins, “The Future Looks Dark for Liars.”
60. Marston, Lie Detector Test, 24; Larson, “The Cardio-Pneumo-Psychogram and Its Use in the Study of the Emotions.”
61. “New Lie Detector was Used on Green,” New York Times, January 15, 1937, 3.
62. “Lie Detection: Device Invented by Priest Wins First Court Recognition,” Newsweek 11, April 11, 1938, 26.
63. Walter G. Summers, “Science Can Get the Confession,” Fordham Law Review 8 (1939): 334–54.
64. “New Lie Detector Was Used on Green.” Summers’ machine was depicted in an English weekly magazine serial in the late 1930s in answer to the question “What Is a Lie Detector?” in Everybody’s Enquire Within, ed. Charles Ray, vol. 1 (London: The Amalgamated Press, Ltd., n.d. [probably 1939]).
65. Although it has become an icon of American popular culture, at least one Russian psychologist has also claimed to have invented the lie detector. In his reminiscences about Soviet psychology, A. R. Luria proclaimed that his early work “turned out to be of practical value to criminologists, providing them with an early model of a lie detector. Aleksandr R. Luria, The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of Soviet Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 35–36.
66. “A Machine to Measure Lies,” Look, January 4, 1938, 29.
67. Ibid.
> 68. Larson, “Introduction,” in Marston, The Lie Detector Test.
69. Keeler, The Lie Detector Man, 2.
70. Marston, The Lie Detector Test, 28.
71. Ibid., 24–25.
72. Ibid., 25–26.
73. Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Age of the Titans: The Progressive Era and World War I (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 10–18.
74. On the emergence of the notion of the heroic inventor in Britain, see Christine MacLeod, Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and British Identity, 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
75. Ibid., 20.
76. Arthur S. Link, American Epoch: A History of the United States since the 1890s (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), 305–6.
77. Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 3.
78. Cashman, America in the Age of the Titans, 26.
79. Keeler filed his patent on July 30, 1925. His invention permitted a simultaneous recording of both the systolic/diastolic cardiac cycle as well as slower, irregular oscillations “which may be superimposed on a considerable number of cardiac cycles.” See “United States Patent Office: Leonarde Keeler of Berkeley, California. Apparatus for Recording Arterial Blood Pressure,” Polygraph: Journal of the American Polygraph Association 3 (1974): 210–15.
80. On scientific personae, see Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum, “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories,” Science in Context 16, no. 1 (2003): 1–8.
81. George Basalla, The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 21–28.
82. Basalla, The Evolution of Technology, 57. See also Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), especially chap. 3.
83. The basis of “Keeler’s mystique,” to use Ken Alder’s apt term, was his patent. But even here the mystique was unfounded because not only did the patent involve merely a minor detail concerning tambour design, but the innovation, Alder suggests, could in fact be credited to the work of Keeler’s former colleagues Hiram Edwards and Charles Sloan (Alder, The Lie Detectors, 78). A further irony was that Keeler’s metal tambours (unlike C. D. Lee’s all-rubber ones) “were prone to fracture and required frequent calibration” (ibid., 123).
84. It also accounts for the acrimonious relationships between the original pioneers. This point is explored at greater length in chap. 6.
85. Inbau, “Scientific Crime Detection,” 6.
86. Although Larson does say that “Keeler’s polygraph has many mechanical imperfections, including those of the driving mechanism.” Larson, Lying and Its Detection, 279.
87. Leonarde Keeler to August Vollmer, September 19, 1932, August Vollmer Papers, ca. 1918–1955, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, California (hereafter AVP).
88. Leonarde Keeler to August Vollmer, March 19, 1934, AVP.
89. Marston, The Lie Detector Test, 27, 50.
90. Ibid., 108.
91. Ibid., 145.
92. Ibid., 78.
93. Leonarde Keeler to August Vollmer, March 28, 1938, AVP.
94. Fred E. Inbau, “The Lie Detector Test by William Moulton Marston,” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science 29 (1938): 305.
95. Ibid.
96. Ibid., 307–8.
97. John A. Larson, “Lie Detection and Criminal Investigation by Fred E. Inbau,” Fordham Law Review 12 (1943): 307–10.
98. Ibid., 308.
99. Inbau, “Scientific Crime Detection,” 8.
100. Ibid., 5.
101. Ibid., 8.
102. Ibid., 5.
103. Larson to Vollmer, June 2, 1951, AVP.
104. Ibid. (emphasis in original).
105. F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 732.
106. Mathew Hale, Human Science and Social Order: Hugo Münsterberg and the Origins of Applied Psychology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 120.
107. Jutta Spillmann and Lothar Spillmann, “The Rise and Fall of Hugo Münsterberg,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 29 (1993): 329.
108. Larson to Vollmer, June 2, 1951, 3, AVP.
109. Larson, Lying and its Detection, 190.
110. Bruno Latour has argued that one of technoscience’s most powerful features is its portability. Bruno Latour (1990), “Drawing Things Together,” in Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 19–68.
111. Alder on Keeler’s software.
112. Latour, Science in Action, 81–82.
113. To this extent, then, the fiction of invention may be regarded as an “origin myth.” As a number of historians have argued, origin myths are far from unusual in historical writing in general and in the history of psychology in particular. On the notion of “invented tradition” see Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence O. Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Ben Harris, “Whatever Happened to Little Albert?” in Ludy Benjamin, ed., A History of Psychology: Original Sources and Contemporary Research (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 424–31.
Chapter 7. “A trick of burlesque employed... against dishonesty”: The Quest for Euphoric Security
Epigraph. Roland Barthes, “Einstein’s Brain,” in Mythologies (London: Paladin Books, 1985), 77. Max Weber, “The Sociology of Charismatic Authority/The Nature of Charismatic Authority and Its Routinization,” in P. David Marshall, ed., The Celebrity Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 2006), 59.
1. Fred E. Inbau, “The ‘Lie-Detector,’” Scientific Monthly 40, 1935, 81–87.
2. Paul V. Trovillo, “A History of Lie Detection,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 30 (1939): 848.
3. Ibid., 858.
4. William Moulton Marston, The Lie Detector Test (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1938), 7.
5. Nealis O’Leary, “A Criminologist to the Rescue,” The Literary Digest 118, October 6, 1934, 22.
6. “Science Devises a Painless ‘3rd Degree,’” Current Opinion 76, April 1924, 474.
7. “The Third Degree,” Look, August 31, 1937, 16–17; “How a Lie Detector Works,” Look, August 31, 1937, 23.
8. Henry Morton Robinson, “Science Gets the Confession,” Forum and Century 93, 1935, 15.
9. Geoffrey C. Bunn, “Spectacular Science: The Lie Detector’s Ambivalent Powers,” History of Psychology 10, no. 2 (2007): 160.
10. Z. Chafee, W. H. Pollack, and C. S. Stern, The Third Degree (New York: Arno Press, 1969). Reprint of United States Wickersham Commission Report No.11: Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement, 1931.
11. E. J. Hopkins, “The Lawless Arm of the Law,” The Atlantic Monthly 148, 1931, 284–85.
12. See, for example, “Examination by Torture,” The Outlook, May 30, 1908, 237–38; Richard Sylvester, “The Treatment of the Accused,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 36 (1910): 16–19.
13. Hugo Münsterberg, On the Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology and Crime (New York: Clark Boardman, 1927), 74. First published in 1908. Münsterberg’s denunciations of the third degree inspired the humanitarian Charles Klein to write a play about the subject. Produced in New York in 1909, it was described as being “one of the cleverest and most startling experiments in melodramatics.” “The Third Degree,” Current Literature 47, October 1909, 427.
14. Marston, The Lie Detector Test, 97.
15. William A. Dyche, “Science in the Detection of Crime,” The Review of Reviews, January 1932, 52.
16. Thomas H. Jaycox, “Scientific Detection of Lies,” Scientific American 156, June 1937, 371.
17. Alva Johnston, “The Magic Lie Detector I,” Saturday Evening Post 216, April 15, 1944, 9.
18. Alva Johnston, “The Magic Lie Det
ector III,” Saturday Evening Post 216, April 29, 1944, 102.
19. Kenneth Murray, “Two Simple Ways to Make a Lie Detector,” Popular Science Monthly 128, 1936, 63, 98–99.
20. Dyche, “Science in the Detection of Crime,” 52–53.
21. Inbau, “The ‘Lie-Detector,’” 83.
22. “Lie Detection,” Living Age 348, March 1935, 92.
23. Robinson, “Science Gets the Confession,” 16.
24. Henry F. Pringle, “How ‘Good’ is Any Lie?,” Reader’s Digest (American Edition) 29, November 1936, 76.
25. “Lie Detector: Marks in Ink Final Judges for Murder Case,” Newsweek 9, March 13, 1937, 34.
26. “Lie Detector Casts Doubt on Constable,” New York Times, November 18, 1937, 19.
27. “Wichita’s Use of the Lie Detector,” The American City 51, December 1936, 91.
28. Thomas H. Jaycox, “Lies-Truths,” Scientific American 161, July 1939, 8.
29. J. P. McEvoy, “The Lie Detector Goes into Business,” Reader’s Digest (American Edition) 38, February 1941, 71.
30. Johnston, “The Magic Lie Detector I,” 73.
31. William Moulton Marston, “Systolic Blood Pressure Symptoms of Deception,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 2 (1917): 162.
32. William Moulton Marston, “Psychological Possibilities in the Deception Tests,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 11 (1921): 568.
33. Harold E. Burtt, “The Inspiration-Expiration Ratio During Truth and Falsehood,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 4 (1921): 23.
34. Leonarde Keeler, “A Method For Detecting Deception,” American Journal of Police Science 1 (1930): 44.
35. Fred E. Inbau, “Scientific Evidence in Criminal Cases II: Methods of Detecting Deception,” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science 24 (1933–34): 1147.
36. Trovillo, “A History of Lie Detection,” 878.
37. Walter G. Summers, “Science Can Get the Confession,” Fordham Law Review 8 (1939): 338–40.
38. John Larson to August Vollmer, January 22, 1931, August Vollmer Papers, ca. 19181955, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, California (hereafter AVP).
39. Johnston, “The Magic Lie Detector I,” 73.
40. Pringle, “How ‘Good’ Is Any Lie?,” 75–76.