The Lie Detectors by Ken Alder

Author:Ken Alder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2007-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

For if all men were to speak the truth

And all hearts were honest, fair, and true

Most of our virtues would serve no use.

In 1939 Keeler set himself up as Keeler, Inc., "personnel consultant," and began to franchise trustworthiness. Whenever possible, he still preferred to work cases himself, though he hired an assistant and trained Jane Wilson—Katherine’s friend and the wife of his partner Charlie Wilson—as the nation’s first female polygraph operator. But he now began to allow selected graduates of his course to buy his machine and set themselves up as Keeler Polygraphers with exclusive license to some territory. One former cop, Russell Chatham, took title to Indiana; another got Michigan. By contract the buyer could not resell the device or let anyone else operate it, and Keeler could even reclaim the machine if he decided that the buyer was in any way "prostituting the field." Keeler’s personal expertise was still his most valuable asset.

For just that reason he switched manufacturers. Over the years Keeler had been bombarded with complaints about the quality of his machine: the tambours leaked; the paper jammed; the pens failed. His manufacturer cannot have been satisfied either; in the span of a decade the firm had sold fewer than fifty machines all told. In 1939 Keeler dropped Oakland’s Western Electrico-Mechanical Corp. in favor of Chicago’s Associated Research, Inc. At this time, he also added a galvanometer to his apparatus. The price of his machine rose from $550 to $900, but the problems with quality persisted.

This put Keeler at a disadvantage against competitors like Orlando Scott and the Jesuit psychologist Walter G. Summers, who boasted of "100 percent accuracy" with a Psychogalvanometer of his own design. Each interrogator had his shtick. Scott had his medical mumbo jumbo; Summers had his clerical collar, plus two Ph.D.s. When Summers died in 1938 his successor was the son of a founder of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations. All Keeler had was his salesman’s self-confidence.

Not until after the war, when his patent expired, did Keeler abandon all restrictions and tell his manufacturing company to "go ahead and sell to anybody." At the time Keeler Inc. was still the only place in the nation to go for training in lie detection: either a two-week orientation course for $30 a week, or the more extensive six-week courses for certificate as a graduate of "Leonarde Keeler, Incorporated"—though Keeler always pointed out that it took at least a year of supervised casework to become a proficient examiner. Among the challenging questions on the final was this one:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.