[ExI] Religion and the E-meter before Hubbard

[Damien Broderick]

TIME, Monday, Oct. 12, 1936

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.

In Father Summers' Woolworth Building laboratory a newshawk grasped an 
electrode in each hand as if he were experimenting with a toy shock 
machine. The electrodes were attached to an apparatus resembling a radio 
set, inside which were two balanced electrical circuits, with a two 
stage amplifier on the input side hooked up to a recording milliammeter. 
Any electrical agitation the newshawk betrayed under emotional stress 
would jiggle the milliammeter, make a needle correspondingly scratch a 
chart.

Producing five cards, Father Summers asked the newshawk to choose one in 
his mind, then deny, card by card, that he had selected any of them when 
they were reshown him. Watching the needle, Father Summers flipped the 
five cards, heard the newshawk's answers, then declared: "Your card was 
the three of diamonds." The newshawk was compelled to admit it was.

The bigger the lie, says Father Summers, the bigger the jiggle. This 
year Providence, R. I. police let him use the machine on a woman 
suspected of theft. When she denied committing the crime herself, the 
needle moved mildly. When she denied knowing who had committed it, the 
needle jumped. In court it was established that the woman actually was 
an accomplice.

The 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.
================================

[Alas, the newshawk failed to note that overuse of the E-meter will 
*create* madmen!]