Early this century, a box with a few wires sticking out and
flickering needles that jumped across a chart recorder would
probably have impressed the average person. Electric gadgets
were newish inventions back then. An uncritical enthusiasm for
science was in the air. These are the most charitable
explanations for the origin of the lie detector. No doubt
William Moulton Marston would have disagreed. For it was Marston
who in 1915 claimed to have discovered that blood pressure often
goes up when people lie. That finding paved the way for the
invention of the polygraph in the 1920s. As for Marston, he went
on to invent the comic strip character Wonderwoman, giving her a
lasso with special powers that forced villains to tell the
truth. And aren't comic strips where the entire pseudoscience of
lie detection properly belongs, too? Probablyso why is the US
Department of Energy to begin carrying ... To continue reading
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