The big lie: how America became obsessed with the polygraph--even though it has never really worked.

• Author: Wallace-Wells, David
• Position: The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession - Book review

The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession By Ken Alder Free Press, 334 pp.

In May 1922, a wealthy family of four was driving home to San Francisco from a day trip in the Santa Cruz mountains when a second car forced them off the road. A gunman stuck a revolver through the driver's window and demanded money. The father, Henry Wilkins, handed him three $100 bills, but the bandit lunged for Anna Wilkins's diamond rings. Enraged, Henry reached for a gun stowed in his glove compartment, his two young children bunkered in the backseat, but the robber shot first, killing Anna Wilkins and disappearing before Henry could respond. "My daddy loved my mother," the Wilkinses' eight-year-old son testified. "She died to save the bandit's bullet from hitting him."

The police were not so sure. A few days after the murder, two brothers, local exconvicts, tried to buy gas with a conspicuous $100 bill, and were picked up. Wilkins claimed he didn't know the men, but police later discovered Wilkins had previously employed one of them himself, in his auto shop. They told Wilkins that the best chance of clearing his name was to submit to examination on an oracular device that had come to be known in the tabloid press as "the lie detector."

The machine, a Rube Goldberg contraption of tubes, pumps, wires, and meters designed to monitor the subject's vital signs and record on smoke-blackened paper telltale jumps in blood pressure and breathing rate, was then chiefly known for finding thieves among honest sorority sisters in a series of breathlessly reported penny-ante Berkeley capers. Wilkins submitted and, as the city watched, passed the test; the police dropped the investigation, and Wilkins was invited to leave the courthouse unmolested. From there he went to meet one of the convicts he had earlier failed to identify. Money changed hands, and Wilkins was heard boasting about his performance on the polygraph. A month later, the other brother, already in jail on other charges, admitted that Wilkins had indeed paid the men to kill his wife and orchestrated the incident on the road. Furious and humiliated, San Francisco police vowed never to employ the lie detector again; at the next meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, their captain declared that future use of the polygraph could not be countenanced.

Since its American debut, the lie detector has been a persistent but extralegal feature of our juridical culture, not much evolved...