MACHINE TO TEST LOVE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 76, Issue 286, 4 December 1933, Page 11

MACHINE TO TEST LOVE

ALARMING POSSIBILITIES ALL THE LITTLE “WHITE LIES.’’ “Here is bad news for wives!” writes Leslie Stowe in the Sunday Chronicle. I have just seen the machine which is going to rob the world of its secrets, to analyse love, and register automatically and scientifically whether a husband is in love with his wife or vice versa, and whether tho criminal in the dock is telling the truth or not.” The machn e is the first of its kind and is only at the initial stage of its development. Its possibilities are described as enormous—and rather frightening. It is the private detective brought right into daily domestic life —it makes all the little white lies so many feathers blown in the air. It records on a graph which cannot be denied the secret thoughts, and it records them so accurately as to b e uncanny.

The writer says:—“lf you are superstitious you will say it is an invention of the IDevil. If you are sane and normal and reasonable, you will say it is a very disturbing thing to be suddenly thrust upon the world. It is like living in a glass house. This amazing machine is the invention of Dr. Alexander Cannon, a well-known scientist. It has taken him years of patient experiment to perfect. Yesterday I was tested, analysed, and put on the rack by this new scientific terror.

“Can you imagine yourself seated in a chair, with a contrivance a little like a lifcTielt strapped across your chest, being asked questions which you know you must answer truthfully unless you want your lie recorded in indelible ink on a sheet of paper? Or listening to music so that every emotion rises and falls until the expert knows exactly what you have been thinking about, and what you have been feeling? “It is not exactly pleasant, and it is not until then that you realise how much there is about you you do not want people to know and how very private your life is. ‘A man is as he thinks. ’ someone has said, but what he thinks has been his own private affair. Now, comes the. moving thinker psychograph, writing silently on the glazed surface of snow-white paper all that he thinks and therefore all that, he is. “I was asked, ‘Dg you like this room?’ I didn’t much, but out of a sort of politeness, which one could not consider as lying, I said ‘Yes it’s a pleasant room.’ There, in red ink on

the psychograph, was recorded the fact that I did not like the room at all. After that and several other things, I began to feel quite nervous. “It is a very refined and civilised third degree—a silent machine in a silent room with a gruff voice asking questions and its inscrutable pen recording the troth. “ ‘Do you like your work?’ I was “T said ‘Yes,* quire emphatically, because it is true. Nevertheless, the machine detected a slight hesitation and actually the thought had just flashed across my mind that work was not so good when the temperature was 85 in th 0 shade. “While I was connected to the apparatus a gramophone record was played bv my side, and I was assured my sub-conscious mind was dancing all the time the record was on. That, also, I knew to be true, and T began to look at the machine as a native in the heart of Africa might look at an aeroplane coming out of the clouds for tho first, time. “I can imagine nothing more calculated to strike terror into the heart of the criminal. *The, cleverest network of lies would be ripped through after a quarter of an hour by this Sphinx-like machine, but it will be welcomed bv the innocent as infallible proof of innocence. There, is no end to its possibility’s on both the tragic and comic side of Ifta.”