Word: polygraph
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Best known mechanical device to detect lying is the polygraph, perfected by Professor Leonarde Keeler of Northwestern University. A subject attached to the polygraph who tells an untruth supposedly registers changes in blood pressure, pulse and respiration which are indicated by a needle jiggling on a graph. Tested last week in Manhattan was another such instrument-the psychogalvanometer. The invention of tall, burly Father Walter G. Summers, S.J., Ph.D., head of Fordham University's department of psychology, the psychogalvanometer works not on the heart and lungs but on the minute electrical currents coursing through the body...
...psychogalvanometer is more comfortable than the polygraph, whose subject has a sphygmomanometer (blood pressure meter) strapped with oppressive tightness on his arm. Neither machine will work on madmen...
...most widely known ''lie detector," the polygraph developed by Law Professor Leonarde Keeler of Northwestern University's Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory, has been useful mainly in extracting confessions from wrongdoers after they were confronted with the evidence of their emotional disturbance. Used by 52 Chicago banks on their employes, the polygraph has turned up many a petty pilferer. Corroborative evidence based on the polygraph has been admitted four times in U. S. courts of law. Last year Governor Comstock of Michigan pardoned a convict who steadfastly denied the murder with which he was charged and successfully passed...