The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (review)

What could be more enticing to historians of machines than a history of machines whose product is truth itself? In The Lie Detectors, Ken Alder brings his considerable wit and talent for rigorously researched yet readable history to the strange story of lie detection devices in the United States.

Although the initial steps were taken at Harvard, under Hugo Münsterberg, the true birthplace of the American lie detector was Berkeley, where it was pursued at the prompting of legendary police chief August Vollmer, the founder of "scientific policing" in the United States. The principal antagonists of Alder's story are John Larson, the first American policeman to hold a doctorate, and Leonarde Keeler, the precocious son of a California bourgeois bohemian who founded his own "cosmic religion." Although collaborators at first under Vollmer's guidance, the two eventually split. Larson became an advocate of scientific rigor—and, therefore, a voice of caution, skepticism, and, ultimately, denunciation toward his own creation. Keeler became a salesman and a showman, his irresponsible bids for publicity and overblown claims driving Larson to apoplexy. The two characters, as Alder paints them, bear an uncanny resemblance to the antagonists of his previous book, The Measure of All Things (2002), the careful, meticulous Pierre-François-André Méchain and the tortured, overreaching Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre.

Alongside Larson and Keeler was a third character, William Moulton Marston, who developed the first working lie detector under Münsterberg and managed to get it excluded from court as evidence forever in the famous Frye case in 1923. Marston eventually slotted the lie detector into a general theory of emotions emphasizing dominance and submission and developed the Wonder Woman comic book to popularize it.

The validity of the polygraph was never established, but, as Alder explains, it was never really necessary. The machine validated itself, as it were, in the court of public opinion and perception. And, moreover, the lie detector was never really detecting lies, anyway; it was detecting other things, principally belief in the efficacy of the machine itself, as well as sometimes simply emotions of guilt and shame. Indeed, Larson's principal objection was not to the device, but to the sensationalist moniker bestowed on it by the press.

None of this prevented the lie detector from having a crude efficacy in extracting confessions in the law enforcement context, obedience in the workplace, and conformity and fear in the political arena. Indeed, as Alder notes, drawing on the Frankenstein metaphor with Larson in the role of tormented creator, the lie detector still persists, technically almost unchanged, stubbornly immune to all efforts to kill it. "The lie detector," Alder notes, "cannot be killed by science, because it is not born of science" (p. 251).

Larson and Keeler struggled to promote the device while maintaining control over its dissemination. Lie detectors have never fully resolved the tension between whether their lie-detecting properties lay in the "mechanical objectivity" of the device or the skill of the operator. To say that the magic resided in the operator entailed denying the mechanical objectivity of the test, but to say it resided in the machine required allowing anyone to use it.

All of this was, and remains, chiefly an American phenomenon; no other country embraced the lie detector to the extent that it was welcomed in the United States. Although Alder gestures toward the military model of European policing and the greater strength of organized labor in Europe, he does not offer a particularly forceful explanation for this.

While Alder is to be commended for his efforts to make the story readable, the style is sometimes a bit too breezy. More important, the narrative is mostly focused on the personal and professional lives of the characters and tends to stay above the fray of technical details. Alder rarely "opens up the black box," as they say. While the quarrels between the antagonists are conveyed in detail, we never really get a...