The Truth Machine by Geoffrey C. Bunn

Author:Geoffrey C. Bunn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2012-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

John Larson resisted the term “lie detector” but nevertheless wanted the credit for inventing it. John A. Larson, Lying and Its Detection: A Study of Deception and Deception Tests (New Jersey: Patterson Smith, 1932). Reprinted by permission of Patterson Smith Publishing, www.patterson-smith.com.

The question who invented the lie detector is problematic because the answer one gives depends on what one means by the term “lie detector.” If the heart of the lie detector is taken to be the discontinuous technique of recording blood pressure then the credit is Marston’s. If the essence is taken to be the continuous technique then the credit is either Larson’s or Arnold Gesell’s.108 Yet as late as 1932 John Larson was insisting that the word association technique “must still remain a police tool—a very efficient police tool.”109 If the fundamental innovation is taken to be the assumed link between blood pressure and criminality then Mosso deserves recognition. In this last case, however, the relationship posited between blood pressure and criminality was quite different due to the different aims of the technology. And even if it were possible to decide on the basis of a single criterion of invention, there would still remain the problem of both Larson and Marston’s residual commitments to clinical case studies as legitimate objects of knowledge. And what of Leonarde Keeler’s claims to inventor status? After all, it was Keeler who designed a compact and portable lie detector.110 It was Keeler who attempted to patent an instrument mechanism in 1925. And it was he who refined and stabilized the software of interrogation procedure.111 In fact, none of the lie detector’s so-called inventors can be credited with making any notable, imaginative, or technological innovations. Journalists, novelists, and writers of detective pulp fiction made the principal conceptual shift that made the lie detector possible—namely the repudiation of criminology’s notion of the born criminal.

Nevertheless, from the early 1920s, the notion of “invention” permeated accounts of the instrument in newspapers, magazines, and books. The construct was necessary precisely because the lie detector was a new blend of old wines in a new bottle, old technologies applied to a new end. That the machine was depicted as an invention boasting an inventor gave it a reputation of scientific credibility. Such a controversial idea as “detecting lies” would hardly have been acceptable had the lie detector been described as a sphygmomanometer, a pneumograph, and a galvanometer housed in a box and operated by a technician. This is also why the “invention” of the lie detector was partly a function of the invention of the term “lie detector,” a form of linguistic “black boxing”: the simplification of scientific complexity and human agency.112 “Invention” gave the lie detector credibility via a culturally valued origin myth, a numinous narrative that served to obscure the instrument’s social and historical origins.113 The myth of invention was primarily promoted in mass culture: national and local newspapers, the sibling-penned hagiography, popular psychology books and magazine articles, comic book histories, personal memoirs, pulp fiction. Although Marston

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