The Truth Machine (27 page)

The semblance of science served not only to legitimate but also to threaten. The black box was not only mysterious but also frightening. Although the lie detector's apparent role was to replace the third degree, it never managed to lose its intimidating character. This feature of the test was recognized in 1929 when the
Literary Digest
described the process when a suspect faces “a new kind of third degree, a strange machine that neatly separates falsehood from truth in the story he tells.”
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The
Science News Letter
might have been somewhat cynical, but its point was well made: “Chief usefulness of the gadget is as an aid to the police in scaring an ignorant or superstitious person into making a confession of crime. An empty black-box, if it looks mysterious, would serve the same purpose—and has been used for it.”
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In fact, an “empty black-box” had already been used to induce confessions. In July 1931, the Philadelphia Police obtained a confession of guilt from a boy with a lie detector made up of stolen radio parts. During the test, which was a curious mixture of modern science and ancient magic, the young suspect was seated in front of the contraption and told that if he told a lie “it would be reflected in a color register behind his back… . Wires were placed on his arms and legs, the police told him, to register his ‘blood flow' in the device. All lights save a small red one were extinguished. Each time the police thought the boy's answers to questions were wrong they told him the ‘lie detector' showed green. Then pepper seeds were put on his tongue. He complained that they burned. ‘Those pills always burn the tongue of a liar,' he was told.” After the
youth began to cry he made a statement implicating himself and five others in a number of recent robberies.
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The “lie box,” as one suspect described it, was extremely intimidating by virtue of its apparent infallibility.
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The rhetoric of the machine's scientificity was completed by an image that would come to achieve iconic status. As the graphical output of the black box, “the chart,” achieved immense persuasive power as the essential record of truth or lies. The first illustration of such a chart appears to have been published in Balmer and MacHarg's Luther Trant (1910) story “The Man Higher Up.” In the story “Professor Schmalz” uses a plethysmograph and a pneumograph to detect a person's disliking of caviar: “The instruments show that at the unpleasant taste you breathe less freely—not so deep. Your finger, as under strong sensation or emotion, grows smaller, and your pulse beats more rapidly.”
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In 1932,
The Review of Reviews
provided what would become the standard image. Accompanying a photograph of Keeler performing a lie detector test were pictures of two short strips of graph paper. The top graph, showing a gently undulating curve, was captioned
“THE TRUTH.”
Below it, another graph described a violently fluctuating line and was captioned
“THE LIE.
”
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A similar “Lie and Truth” image was chosen by
The Literary Digest
to illustrate an article, “Detecting Liars.”
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“One subject made both records,” read the caption. “The upper is the ‘lie' record, the lower one is when he told the truth.” In a later piece, “Catching Criminals with Lie-Detector,” the magazine printed a photograph of “The blood-pressure record of an embezzler who decided to go straight.” The upper section, “taken before he confessed, shows characteristic tension, caused by lying. The lower section, after full confession, shows steady, normal pressure.”
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Such comparison graphs were very popular.

Sometimes only a single strip of graph paper was shown. In such cases, the graph would invariably undulate smoothly until interrupted by a disturbance that signified the lie. An arrow might point the reader to the crucial moment. The legend on
Scientific Monthly's
illustration was “The arrow on each record indicates the peak of tension in the subject's blood pressure curve—the point at which the lie was told.”
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“A black arrow points to the jagged peak,” a 1937
Literary Digest
illustration was captioned, “depicting a lie which sent Joseph Rappaport to the chair for murder.”
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The lie occurs at an apparently simple and discrete moment, and that moment could be detected, and its parameters calculated. Readers were led to believe that the graph paper could almost speak for itself, so obvious was the appearance of the lie. According to the rhetoric of the image, the chart did not need a human operator because the
machinery seemed to work so well as to not require one: the truth was plain for all to see. Images of the chart obscured the operator, whose role it was to scrutinize the chart in order to render it intelligible.
Reader's Digest's
reporter was glad that the questions of his mock examination had not been too embarrassing, “for the wig-wag lines on the polygraph's recording roll of graph paper indicated all too clearly when I had lied.”
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Responsibility for determination of truth was transferred from human to machine: “The needles flickered unsteadily, indicating, Professor Keeler said later, that Rappaport was lying… . Professor Keeler turned to casual questioning. The needles graphed a steady course.”
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Because the physiological detection of deception was essentially an interpretive human enterprise, an edifice had to be constructed around the instrument to deflect criticisms of its subjective and perhaps arbitrary nature. Although human scrutiny was necessary to interpret the curves on the chart, discourse about the lie detector worked to hide this fact.

Yet, paradoxically, the lie detector's advocates were anxious to stress that their expertise was indispensable for the success of the venture. Such a tension was part of the larger problem of the presence of the polygraph operator. If a machine could detect a lie automatically, why was an expert required? The operator was potentially a mere technician, a cog in the machine. Yet he was also the expert, the sage, and, ideally, also the instrument's inventor. The charismatic authority of the expert mediated this fine balance between these two opposing poles.

Not everyone found the rhetoric persuasive, however. In 1939, A. A. Lewis criticized the myth of the autonomous black box in an article for the
Scientific Monthly.
“Diogenes is back again with his lantern,” he wrote. “But this time the lantern looks too much like a laboratory to be regarded as a trick of burlesque employed to incite an insurrection against dishonesty”: “These detective instruments, like an X-ray machine, may turn culprit or criminal inside out, as by zigzagging curves and dial readings his deeper bodily changes are made visible, but it still remains to interpret the picture. The suspect's guilt or innocence is not spelled out in unmistakable letters. The fact that these deeper, organic reactions are involuntary and can't be made to belie culpability like a face ‘kept straight,' does not guarantee that they can be subject to no other source of causation except actual misconduct.” By calling the lie detector operator a “laboratory magician,” Lewis hoped he would undermine the claim made by advocates that the instrument had scientific credibility.
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In fact, attributions of magic actually supported the agenda of lie detector advocates.

The scientific “chart” so easily became a numinous “scroll.” Sacred truths were being revealed. An illustration of a “typical graph” in
Scientific American
encapsulated the conjunction of science and magic: “This graph depicts the sudden rise in blood pressure at the point of attempted deception. The subject was handed ten well-shuffled playing cards, with instructions to choose a card and then lie about his choice. Respiration at top, blood pressure below. Notice where he said ‘No' to the three of diamonds. He later admitted that the three of diamonds had been his choice.”
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Observers were led to believe that lie detector could perform card tricks. Although the ostensible purpose of the “stim test” (as it would become known) was to “obtain controls,” the trick also functioned as a remarkable demonstration of the machine's abilities. “Control readings” were normally obtained through the use of innocuous or irrelevant questions. But the importance of the card trick lay in its power of intimidation.

Consider, for example, the point made by Father Summers, inventor of the psycho-galvanometer lie detector, to a reporter for
Forum and Century
magazine. He was shown ten playing cards and asked to make a mental note of one of them, “keeping my selection a secret… . I chose the deuce of hearts; the cards were shuffled and then displayed to me one at a time. ‘Is this your card?' asked Father Summers, as each was turned up. I steadfastly replied, ‘No,' keeping my eyes on the galvanometer dial to see what happened. When the deuce of hearts appeared, I said, ‘No,' as coolly and disinterestedly as possible, but the indicator shot up like a jack-in-the-box. After two repetitions of the test, I broke down and ‘confessed' that I was lying about the deuce of hearts.” “So you see,” said Father Summers, “if one perspires over a little thing like a playing card, what would happen if a real crime were being concealed.”
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The trick was already a component of the orthodox examination by the early thirties. “So delicate is the apparatus,” reported the
New York Times
in 1931, “that a subject can be asked to select a card from a deck and will react at once when the correct card is picked up.”
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In 1937, Keeler used the technique on Joseph Rappaport, the convicted murderer whose eleventh-hour jail cell lie test sealed his fate.
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A photograph accompanying a
Newsweek
story on the lie detector showed Keeler revealing a playing card to a female subject strapped to the lie detector. “Professor Keeler's card trick works nine times out of ten,” read the caption.
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The entire procedure was a classic piece of misdirection. What looked like the work of the instrument was actually a ruse engineered by the operator using a marked playing card. Keeler, a keen amateur magician, had devised the sleight of hand.
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The lie detector was considered magic because it embodied scientific progress: it discovered the truth, promoted justice, and was humane. “The machine has now been used in 60,000 cases,” the
Saturday Evening Post
enthused, “and its uncanny power of penetrating guilty secrets has been thoroughly established.” The lie detector was awe-inspiring because it was thought that it could achieve its impressive results on its own, without human assistance: “Automatically controlled pens will record the slightest deviation from the truth.” The attribution of consciousness was irresistible: “When a lawbreaker denies his crime during a lie-detector examination, the pens become feverishly animated. A guilty man, seeing that the machine is practically photographing his soul, usually cuts short the examination by confessing.”
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What was most magical about the lie detector was its “uncanny power” of agency. It was thought that the machine, not the human operator, did the work. The
Saturday Evening Post
articles were peppered with personifications and attributions of agency: “The lie detector acts as a mechanical conscience”; “the machine had solved some baffling mysteries”; “The detector has a peculiar genius for geography”; “It can read a nervous, excitable person like a book; it can read a tough, hard-boiled character like a book”; “It airs a scandal in a sorority house, stops students from cribbing, bank presidents from tapping the till, and releases a guiltless man condemned to a lifetime in jail.”

The instrument was often described as possessing human body parts, such as “an accusing finger.” In its review of electronic devices used for “the detection and prevention of crime,”
Radio News
asserted that the field was “richly aided by the sharp eye and keen ear of electronic devices of one sort or another.”
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“Three moving fingers of the Keeler Polygraph record these changes,” observed
Reader's Digest.
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And if it possessed a body, then it also possessed a mind. “The vast majority of defendants,” claimed the magazine, “are entirely confident that they can outwit the little black box.” A subject experiencing a lie test “made vigorous denials, but the polygraph betrayed him.” The instrument habitually took on a persona in these narratives, such as the street-wise detective.
Reader's Digest
introduced its piece with the caption “The ‘lie-detector' at work solving crimes.”
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“To the lie detector goes the credit for ‘cracking' this strange enigma,” remarked
Scientific American
about one particularly puzzling case, “and searching out the murderer from among nearly 50 suspects, as well as locating the murder weapon.” It was a “machine that knows all the answers,” promising to show how “Leonarde Keeler's astounding invention tracks down murderers, unmasks the liars and the larcenous, and can tell you just how honest you are—and intend to be.”
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A. A. Lewis described the instrument as a “mind reading device.”
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Although the lie detector's scientific credentials apparently contradicted its supernatural abilities, both qualities were acceptable within a broader context that encouraged the responses of awe and intimidation.

“It is difficult for an accused person to escape taking the test,” wrote
Reader's Digest;
“to refuse is a fairly clear admission of guilt.”
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Because the test was depicted as being a scientific and humane interview technique, it became virtually impossible to refuse to take it without incurring a suspicion of guilt. Three “ace” detectives were demoted to patrol duty by the police committee for their unwillingness to submit to lie detector tests during a District Attorney's investigation of gambling, reported the
New York Times
in 1938.
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“Ordinarily, a suspect cannot be legally compelled to face the lie detector,” said the
Saturday Evening Post.
“It doesn't look good, however, for one who proclaims his innocence to refuse. Nearly every accused man pretends to welcome the test.”
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