It’s hard not to appreciate the irony that one of the most famous “weapons” in all of superhero lore doesn’t have the smashing power of a thunder god’s hammer or the fancy high-tech destructive force of a billionaire’s metal suit. It’s a rope — a gleaming, golden rope wielded by a warrior princess who doesn’t use it to pummel villains but to pry the truth out of them. Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth is one of those comic book inventions that seems fantastical yet strangely plausible, the kind of thing humanity would love to have tucked away in a police station. And there’s a reason it feels that way: it sprang from the mind of a man who also helped create a real-world device designed to catch liars — the polygraph.

Yes, the man behind Wonder Woman’s truth-compelling rope also gave the world a device designed to sniff out lies by measuring how much your body panics when you fib. And like so many things in early-20th-century science and superhero comics, the story is weird, brilliant, and just a little bit bonkers. So let’s start at the beginning — with a psychologist who wanted to make the world more honest and somehow ended up creating a woman who can bench-press tanks while compelling you to “just tell the truth already.”

Meet William Moulton Marston: Psychologist, Inventor, Comic Book Revolutionary

William Moulton Marston was not the sort of man to live a quiet life. Born in Massachusetts in 1893, he breezed through Harvard, where he earned a law degree and a Ph.D. in psychology — because sleep is optional for creators of iconic superheroes. He studied under Hugo Münsterberg, one of the pioneers of applied psychology, and quickly became fascinated by one of humanity’s most persistent problems: lying.

Marston believed that lies left traces not just in words but in bodies. He suspected that when people lie, their emotions betray them, causing involuntary physical changes. Around 1915, he zeroed in on one measurable signal: blood pressure. Marston’s early experiments showed that systolic blood pressure (the top number on your blood pressure reading — the one that spikes when your boss says “we need to talk”) tended to rise when someone was being deceptive. He reasoned that if you could measure that physiological reaction, you might be able to tell whether someone was telling the truth.

It was one of the first baby steps toward the polygraph. And like most baby steps, it wasn’t exactly graceful. Marston’s “systolic blood pressure deception test” was crude by today’s standards, but it was a start — and he was proud of it. He began promoting it as a breakthrough in criminal investigation and even testified in court about its potential. Unfortunately, judges at the time were less than impressed. In a 1923 ruling, Frye v. United States, the D.C. Court of Appeals rejected Marston’s testimony, declaring that the device had not yet gained “general acceptance” in the scientific community. Translation: neat idea, Bill, but we’re not letting you put electrodes on witnesses just yet.

Still, Marston had a knack for self-promotion, and he wasn’t done. He published articles, gave interviews, and told anyone who would listen that his invention would change the world. Marston also created the DISC theory of personality (Dominance, Inducement, Submission, Compliance) — still used in organizational psychology today.

Notably, he made a bold claim that women were more truthful than men and therefore naturally suited to wield power — a belief that would come back in a very unexpected way.

From the Lab to the Comic Page: Wonder Woman and the Lasso of Truth

By the late 1930s, Marston had done something few academics ever manage: he made himself a minor celebrity. He was writing books, lecturing on psychology, and consulting for companies like Universal Pictures. But his most unexpected career move came when he caught the attention of Maxwell Charles Gaines, the publisher of All-American Publications (later part of DC Comics). Gaines hired Marston as an educational consultant to help improve the public image of comic books, which were under fire for corrupting the youth.

Marston had a bigger idea. He believed comics could be a tool for social change, shaping public attitudes and modeling virtues. And in 1941, under the pen name Charles Moulton, he created a new kind of superhero: a woman who embodied strength, justice, and above all, truth. That superhero was Wonder Woman.

Wonder Woman wasn’t just another costumed vigilante; she was the embodiment of Marston’s psychological theories. Her mission wasn’t to pummel wrongdoers into dust (although she could); it was to reform them. And her most iconic weapon — the Lasso of Truth — was a direct reflection of Marston’s fascination with detecting deception. Just as his blood pressure test aimed to expose lies by physiological means, the lasso compelled honesty by magical ones. “The only hope for civilization,” Marston once wrote, “is the greater freedom, development and equality of women in all fields of human activity.” And who better to lead that charge than an Amazon who could literally force men to tell the truth?

The connection wasn’t lost on readers — or on Marston himself. The Lasso of Truth was his science wrapped in mythology, his crime fighting dream transposed into comic panels. And unlike the actual polygraph, Wonder Woman’s rope never gave a false reading.

Other aspects of his life influenced Wonder Woman’s creation. Marston lived in a household with his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston and partner Olive Byrne. These women of strong personalities were a definite influence on his new character. Byrne’s bracelets even inspired Wonder Woman’s cuffs — although we suspect they were not quite as bulletproof.

The Evolution of the Polygraph: More Wires, More Worries

While Marston was busy rewriting the superhero genre, other researchers were refining the science he helped launch. In 1921, John Augustus Larson, a police officer and physiology student at the University of California, Berkeley, created the first practical polygraph. Larson’s version didn’t just measure blood pressure — it added respiration and galvanic skin response (that’s the fancy term for how much your skin sweats under stress). The result was a machine that could track multiple physiological changes simultaneously, hence the name “polygraph” (“many writings”).

Larson’s polygraph grabbed the attention of law enforcement. It was first used in Berkeley to investigate thefts and quickly spread to police departments across the country. In the 1930s, Leonarde Keeler further improved the design, making the device portable and more user-friendly (well, as “user-friendly” as strapping someone to a machine that accuses them of lying can be). Keeler’s version became the standard in police work for decades.

By the mid-20th century, the polygraph was everywhere: in police stations, courtrooms, corporate HR departments, and Cold War spy agencies. It was part science, part theater — and its promise was seductive: a machine that could cut through lies and expose the truth. The reality, of course, was more complicated. But before we get to the messy bits, let’s look at one of the polygraph’s biggest moments in the spotlight.

The Lindbergh Kidnapping and the “Lie Detector” on Trial

On the evening of March 1, 1932, someone climbed a homemade ladder into the second-floor nursery of Charles Lindbergh — the world-famous aviator — and abducted his 20-month-old son. The crime shocked the nation and launched one of the largest investigations in American history. The press dubbed it “The Crime of the Century.”

Desperate for leads, investigators turned to every tool available —including the emerging lie detection devices on some suspects and witnesses, hoping physiological responses might help narrow leads.

Investigators asked Lindbergh’s permission to use lie detectors on his household staff. He refused, stating that he had complete confidence in the integrity of those who worked for him.

Suspects and witnesses were subjected to lie detector tests in hopes of narrowing the field. While the results weren’t admissible in court (and still aren’t, in most jurisdictions), they played a role in guiding the investigation.

The trail eventually led to Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German carpenter found with marked ransom bills and handwriting matching the ransom notes. Hauptmann maintained his innocence until the end, but in 1935 he was convicted of kidnapping and murder and executed the following year. The polygraph didn’t directly convict him, but it helped shaped the investigation that did. And the Lindbergh case cemented the polygraph’s reputation as a serious tool of law enforcement — a reputation it has both benefited from and struggled under ever since.

The Science (Such As It Is) Behind the Polygraph

The polygraph is often called a “lie detector,” but that’s not quite accurate. It doesn’t detect lies directly — it measures physiological changes that might be associated with lying. Modern polygraphs typically record three key signals:

• Blood Pressure and Heart Rate: Just like Marston discovered, lying often causes spikes in blood pressure and heart rate as the body responds to stress.
• Respiration: Breathing patterns can become shallower, faster, or irregular when someone is being deceptive.
• Galvanic Skin Response (GSR): Sweat glands go into overdrive under stress, changing the skin’s electrical conductivity. This is why polygraph sensors are attached to your fingertips — they’re basically watching you sweat.

During a typical polygraph test, subjects are asked a series of questions — some neutral (“Is your name Bob?”), some relevant to the investigation (“Did you take the money?”). The examiner compares physiological responses to these different types of questions. Significant spikes on the relevant questions may suggest deception.

That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, many factors — nervousness, fear, anger, caffeine, even the way questions are asked — can produce similar physiological responses. If a person is comfortable with telling lies, the body will betray no physiological responses. For that reason, politicians pathological liars have nothing to fear from the device. That’s one reason courts have long been skeptical about treating polygraph results as definitive proof of anything.

The official position is that the polygraph is “an interrogation tool.” Polygraph operators are trained in leveraging the polygraph readings to encourage those who are being interrogated to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

The Machine That Cried “Liar”

For all its fame, the polygraph has a long history of getting it spectacularly wrong. Here are a few infamous examples where the “lie detector” either failed outright or was used disastrously:

• The Wenatchee Sex Ring Case (1990s): Dozens were accused of participating in a child sex ring in Washington State. Polygraph tests were used to pressure confessions and bolster prosecutions — many of which later collapsed as false.
• Aldrich Ames (1980s–1990s): A CIA officer who sold secrets to the Soviets for nearly a decade passed multiple polygraph tests. Turns out a cool head and a good night’s sleep can fool the machine.
• Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer: Ridgway killed dozens of women in Washington State. Early in the investigation, he passed a polygraph and was dismissed as a suspect — a mistake that allowed him to keep killing for years.

These failures are why many scientists argue that the polygraph measures anxiety, not dishonesty. It’s also why most courts refuse to admit polygraph evidence — and why employers and government agencies use it with extreme caution (or not at all).

Truth, Lies, and a Golden Lasso

William Moulton Marston probably didn’t expect that his obsession with truth would spawn both a comic book legend and a century-long debate about science and justice. Yet here we are: his work laid the foundation for the polygraph, a device that’s been hailed as a revolutionary tool, derided as pseudoscience, and immortalized in more crime dramas than we can count. And his greatest fictional creation wields a weapon that embodies the same idea — that truth, once revealed, has the power to change the world.

Maybe that’s the real legacy of the polygraph and the Lasso of Truth alike. Neither is perfect, neither is infallible, and both raise as many questions as they answer. But both reflect a deeply human hope: that somewhere out there, there’s a way to cut through the lies and get to the heart of the matter. And if we can’t quite build a machine to do it, well — at least we can still imagine a woman who can.

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