The Truth Machine (24 page)

A related development was the innovation of the term “lie detector.” Apparently first used in Charles Walk's novel
The Yellow Circle
(1909), by 1922
the
San Francisco Examiner
noted that the term was a matter of common parlance: “Everybody has heard of the ‘lie detector.' Put it on a criminal's arm and ask him a rude question and if he lies the little wings of the machine will flop up and down.”
⁵⁷
It took a few years before the term became fixed in the popular imagination, however, because similar terms remained in circulation. A brief notice in the
New York Times
in June 1922, for example, described a “lietector.”
⁵⁸
“Capillary electrometer” and “emotiograph” were also used.
⁵⁹
Larson called his instrument the “Cardio-Pneumo-Psychogram,” or the “emotion recorder.”
⁶⁰
Keeler initially gave his instrument the unwieldy title “Pneumo-Cardio-Sphygmogalvanograph.” As the lie was beginning to replace the inherent criminal as the essential problem for criminology, it followed that the lie detector would come to embody the dream of criminology.

Even at this early stage in the machine's development, a number of confusing issues remained. Although the term “lie detector” would eventually triumph over competing terms, no single person would outsmart his competitors for the title “inventor of the lie detector.” As the lie detector's fame grew and other instruments were developed, several other claimants to the title “inventor of the lie detector” emerged. In January 1937, for example, the
New York Times
reported that a “new type of ‘lie detector'” was “the invention of the Rev. Walter G. Summers.”
⁶¹
A 1938
Newsweek
headline read “Lie Detection: Device Invented by Priest Wins First Court Recognition.”
⁶²
The “Rev. Walter G. Summers, S. J.” maintained that “Science Can Get the Confession.”
⁶³
Father Summers had built an instrument based solely on the resurrected principle of psychogalvanometry. “Particularly enthusiastic about his invention,” reported one newspaper, “he believed innocent parties could in the future be saved from prolonged questioning or even trial through elimination by the detector.”
⁶⁴
Whenever a newspaper credited use of the instrument with solving a crime or a popular magazine exhibited a novel type of lie detector, the article was invariably accompanied by a description of the instrument's inventor.
⁶⁵
In January 1938, a
Look
magazine article described “A Machine To Measure Lies.”
⁶⁶
“The new thought wave lie detector is given a workout by Rosemary Price,” said the caption to a photograph of a woman whose head and hands had been attached to two electrodes: “One contact is placed at the base of the brain and two more on the hands. Dr. Orlando F. Scott, the inventor of the machine, says that women respond with so much electrical energy that their lies are easier to detect than those of men.”
⁶⁷

“There is a mistaken impression,” complained Larson, “that every operator who uses the one established test has ‘invented' a ‘new Lie Detector' of
his own.”
⁶⁸
“Magazine and newspaper articles often referred to Nard as the inventor of the lie detector,” recalled Eloise Keeler: “Whenever this was called to his attention, he would explain he had developed his own instrument, the Keeler Polygraph (Greek for ‘many pictures'), a neat, compact, portable instrument that he'd improved over the years. He also started the first school for polygraph examiners and was a pioneer in the field of lie detection.”
⁶⁹
Marston also scorned the notion of invention, like his mentor Münsterberg before him, preferring to be described as the “discoverer” of the systolic blood pressure deception test. “I have never claimed credit for the ‘invention' of a single instrument in connection with the Lie Detector Test,” he wrote, somewhat disingenuously.
⁷⁰
He complained about those newspapers and magazines that erroneously described the instrument as an invention, and he listed those cases “likely to befuddle the popular mind about the fact that the Lie Detector is a test and not a machine, and also about the minor matter of who ‘invented' it.”
⁷¹
“Whoever happens to be using the Lie Detector Test at the moment,” Marston concluded, “becomes its inventor, and whatever form of the old apparatus he happens to be using must be called a ‘new Lie Detector' or a ‘marvelous new machine' which has just been invented.”
⁷²
The psychologist astutely recognized that “old apparatus” had simply acquired a new use.

The “invention of the lie detector” was predominantly a matter not of technological advance, but rather of conceptual, procedural, and, to some extent, terminological innovation. Because its history consisted of relatively small changes made over a number of years by many different persons, it is therefore not legitimate to speak of the instrument as being an “invention” at all— at least in the way that term is popularly understood. The lie detector was merely exploiting a mythic tradition of invention that had been constructed during the age of industrialization following the Civil War. The period 1865 to the First World War was characterized in the United States by rapid urbanization and spectacular economic growth. Exports rose from $1.49 million in 1900 to $2.3 billion in 1914. America had become the world's leading producer of coal by 1913, and by 1919 it was supplying two-thirds of the world's oil.
⁷³
The relatively high cost of labor encouraged investment in mechanization in the hope that industry could be made more efficient. Invention was the motor of progress and inventors the heroes of the age. This was the era of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Wilbur and Orville Wright, and Henry Ford. Their inventions—the telephone, the electric lamp, the motion picture, the airplane, and the motorcar—signified the very essence of modernity.

Popular ideology depicted these inventors as heroic figures.
⁷⁴
They stood for the American ideal that through endeavor and perseverance the ordinary man could single-handedly produce great technological advances.
⁷⁵
Behind the ideology of individualism lay the imperatives of capital: invention was fuelled by economic necessity. Edison patented over one thousand inventions while he was the nominal head of an enormous research factory. Henry Ford's mass production line had been made possible by a whole series of precision inventions.
⁷⁶
The Wright brothers were heavily indebted to numerous earlier workers. Guglielmo Marconi amalgamated the work of others into a practical package. Such technological innovations as the incandescent light bulb, the airplane, and the automobile might well be privileged in the popular technological imaginary, but their existence is heavily indebted to intricate labor processes and social networks.
⁷⁷
While nineteenth-century technology was dominated by invention, in the twentieth century, the history of science and technology was characterized more by innovation, the creation of novel commercial products.
⁷⁸
This is certainly true of the lie detector, whose constituent parts—the sphygmomanometer, the pneumograph, the galvanometer, and the kymograph—were all developed in the nineteenth century. It was Leonarde Keeler who first brought all three components together in a single box and who took out a patent on a minor innovation dealing with the measurement of blood pressure.
⁷⁹
The lie detector pioneers, like the generation of inventors that preceded them, both actively sought fame and exploited the heroic persona of the inventor that was already deeply rooted in American culture.
⁸⁰

It is ironic that at the very moment the lie detector was being promoted as a heroic invention, the notion of invention was itself being criticized by contemporary sociologists and historians.
⁸¹
Even today, it seems, it is widely believed that inventions are the result of revolutions brought about by heroic individual geniuses. This was the idea self-consciously promoted by the lie detector's advocates, a process assisted by concealing earlier technologies, obscuring their different ambitions, and playing up the instrument's mystique.
⁸²
The instrument's history is considerably more complex than traditional heroic narratives allow, particularly those that focus on mundane details of hardware at the expense of the many social, cultural, conceptual, and disciplinary factors that rendered the project of lie detection plausible. Because such histories are committed to the idea that the lie detector was invented, they are obliged to choose which narrative tradition to privilege. If the lie detector
was an invention, then there can be only one inventor, so the reasoning went.
⁸³
This partly explains why the two narrative traditions, Berkeley and Boston, remain relatively independent.
⁸⁴

It also explains the curious and notable fact that the lie detector's principal actors mistrusted and disliked each other intensely. Larson and Keeler were not on convivial terms, according to Fred Inbau: “Larson thought that Keeler had stolen some of his ideas and whatnot, and that the instrument that later was developed and labeled the Keeler polygraph was really something that Larson was primarily responsible for. So there was that ill feeling.”
⁸⁵
There are a few references to Keeler in Larson's
Lying and Its Detection,
and certainly no “slanderous” ones, but Keeler nevertheless felt he had been betrayed.
⁸⁶
“I received a copy of Larson's book the other day,” he told his mentor August Vollmer in September 1932, “and rather felt he outdid himself in knocking me every time he had a chance. In some of the cases he cited, he obtained his information from foreign accounts; instead of coming to me for details and getting a true account of the facts, he published every slanderous thing he could think of about me. Of course, all this was put in after I read the original manuscript.” Keeler regretted that Larson had to resort to publishing his criticisms of him, “rather than telling me about them to my face. I feel that I can hardly trust him in the future.”
⁸⁷

Larson was “still up to his old tricks” two years later. Keeler had apparently done his best to be amicable and “to cooperate with him whenever possible”: “He always seems so friendly in my presence, but behind my back that's a different story. To individuals and in public talks and articles, he slams and pokes and tells some of the darndest lies you ever heard. Now he has the delusion that I'm trying to get his job.”
⁸⁸
“If I thought we could save him from a complete mental breakdown,” Keeler continued, “I'd give him a half interest in the patents, but I'm afraid even that wouldn't help.” Keeler was even less impressed with Marston's
The Lie Detector Test.
Marston praised Keeler for being a worker “of high standing and accomplishment” although he did suggest that his apparatus might be “somewhat expensive.”
⁸⁹
“Great credit for developing systematic lie detection in the banks should go to Mr. Leonarde Keeler,” Marston wrote, adding, “He has done pioneer service in applying the deception test to commercial uses.”
⁹⁰
On the whole, the “Boston lawyerscientist” appears to have given Keeler his rightful dues, crediting him with having a “clever, persistent drive.”
⁹¹
Marston was certainly keen to emphasize that Keeler had not invented the lie detector. But it was Marston's claim that the younger man had once been “over-zealous” in his efforts to secure
one particular confession that had so enraged Keeler.
⁹²
“I was, of course, extremely disappointed in Marston's book,” he told Vollmer in 1938, “but can well understand that when Marston and Larson get their heads together my stock goes down 100%.” “He not only took all the below-the-belt blows at me that he could but in many respects was extremely unfair in criticizing our work and myself because of newspaper accounts. He is apparently so small that he didn't have the decency to get proper statistics from me regarding the bank work we have done, and instead took a second-hand figure quoted by some Chicago bank official. But such is life; and when my book is ready for publication I am going to cite Marston and Larson only from their writings and am not going to stoop to using a lot of irrelevant adjectives in order to belittle them. I think that as a scientific account of the detection of deception the Marston book ranks zero.” Keeler told Vollmer that his loyal acolytes Fred Inbau and Al Dunlap were both writing reviews of Marston's book, “and in both cases Marston will find them rather uncomplimentary.”
⁹³

Inbau didn't disappoint, calling Marston's book “an Alice-in-Wonderland journey through the fields of lies, liars, and lie-detectors.”
⁹⁴
Inbau's complaint was that the monograph was not scientifically credible. In making such “sweeping statements” as “there is no reason why 90 per cent of society's crime bill cannot be written off by the Lie Detector,” Inbau accused Marston of forgetting that “he is supposed to play the role of a
scientist
and not that of a popular magazine writer, or newspaper reporter, or special guest on some advertiser's radio program. Apparently the author has repeated such exaggerations so often in
Esquire,
in
This Week,
and over the
Nash
and other radio programs that he really believes them himself.”
⁹⁵
Having ridiculed Marston's claim to priority, Inbau suggested that the psychologist's attacks on other workers in the field came “close to being libelous.” The book was “practically useless as a guide to a person who seeks to detect deception by means of a ‘lie-detector.'” “It is not possessed of sufficient interest to warrant the attention of the average reader who seeks an insight into the catacombs of ‘science,'” he continued. “And because of the manner in which it is written—with its self praise unconcealed beneath a guise of bashful modesty, with its unjustifiable attempts to discredit the efforts of other workers, and a denial of proper credit to the author's predecessors—it can only bring ridicule upon the subject matter and disrespect for its author.”
⁹⁶