—Roland Barthes (1972) “Any kind of ordeal as a means of evidence is, of course, aderivative of charismatic justice.” —Max Weber (1922) The first accounts of the lie detector’s history emphasized the scientific credentials of the instrument’s advocates. Above all, they depicted the machine as being a product of modernity, the opposite of superstition. “In China there existed a practise of requesting an accused to chew rice and then spit it out for examination,” wrote Fred Inbau in 1935 in The Scientific Monthly, “and if the rice were dry the subject was considered guilty.”1 “In India the movement of a suspect’s big toe was supposed to be an indication of deception.” “The interrogation of criminal suspects may not be easier today than formerly,” wrote Paul Trovillo in his 1939 “History of Lie Detection,” “but it is at least on a more objective basis.”2 Trovillo’s history included accounts of the AyurVeda (900 BC), Erasistratus, the Greek physician (300–250 BC), ordeals of the Middle Ages, and the researches of Mosso and Lombroso.
