Creative battle.

Do you love True Crime Podcasts but could do without the chatty banter? Are you intrigued

by what's underneath our collective True Crime obsession and want to hear field experts,

authors and content creators wait in on the matter? Well, it might be time for you to

kill the small talk and join the dialogue. I'm Rebecca Sebastian, host of Dialogue

at True Crime Conversation. It's a weekly podcast where I speak with fascinating guests

from the True Crime world and the criminal justice system. Together, we explore the genre

itself and attempt to answer the why of True Crime and also the question, what are we even

talking about when we talk about True Crime? Join me, every Wednesday, for a new episode

and a killer conversation. Dialogue is part of the Crawl Space Network and available

wherever you listen.

This year in 2021, the polygraph machine turns 100 years old. Of course, man has been

lying since the beginning of time. That's a lot of lying and humans have tried all kinds

of creative ways to find out if someone is telling the truth. The oldest technique is torture.

In the Middle Ages, they would use boiling water unsuspected liars. They believed that honest

men would tolerate the pain better. Brutal, yes. Torture almost guarantees a confession,

but the quality of those confessions are pretty unreliable. It wasn't until 1921 that a machine

was created that could measure both blood and breathing. We call this the polygraph machine.

It's much more gentle than pulling off someone's fingernails with pliers. But the question

is how accurate is it? The device has changed form since its inception, but the basic

technology essentially remains the same. Here's George Mashkae from antipolygraph.org.

There was an earlier device developed by William Moulton Marston, who later went on to

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