Why Did William Moulton Marston Invent The Lie Detector?

I’ve always loved wandering through weird trivia rabbit holes, and William Moulton Marston pops up all over mine. He taught psychology at Tufts University, and he also had a teaching/lecturing connection with Harvard where he earned his degrees. That combo—Tufts for regular teaching duties and Harvard for his doctoral work and occasional lectures—was how he mixed academia and public-facing research. What fascinates me is how his lab work bled into pop culture: his research into systolic blood pressure helped develop an early form of the lie detector, and his psychological ideas fed directly into creating 'Wonder Woman'. I once pulled a copy of 'Emotions of Normal People' from a secondhand shop and felt like I was holding the schematic of someone who loved ideas, publicity, and storytelling. If you ever stroll the Tufts campus, you can almost imagine a young Marston lecturing students about emotion and behavior, and then sketching a character who embodied some of those theories.

I still get a little giddy thinking about how oddly brilliant Marston’s origin story for 'Wonder Woman' is. He wasn’t just a comics guy — he was a psychologist who helped invent the systolic blood pressure test that later fed into the lie detector idea. He wanted a heroine who embodied truth and love, so he literally gave her the Lasso of Truth, a gadget with ideological roots in his own work. He wrote the early strips under the pen name Charles Moulton and teamed up with artist Harry G. Peter to turn his ideas into art. The character first popped up in 'All Star Comics' #8 in 1941 and then anchored 'Sensation Comics' a year later. A lot of the visual details came from his real life: Olive Byrne’s wide bracelets inspired Wonder Woman’s bracers, and the feminist thinking of his wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, helped shape Diana’s mission. Reading this as a collector, I love that 'Wonder Woman' grew from a tangled, human story — psychology experiments, progressive feminism, and a nontraditional family life — all rolled into one iconic heroine who still feels timely.

Watching 'Professor Marston and the Wonder Women' felt like stepping into a glossy, human-sized myth rather than a strict documentary. I loved how the film foregrounds the emotional and sexual dynamics between William, Elizabeth, and Olive—the tenderness, the jealousy, the experiments—and that emotional core is where the movie scores its biggest truths. Still, it compresses and simplifies timelines: several events are moved around or condensed to build drama, and some of William's academic work and the broader cultural context are sidelined for intimacy. On the historical side, the movie leans into the polyamorous relationship as a defining claim, which is supported by letters and family accounts, but the way the film stages psychological experiments and the bondage imagery feels amplified for cinematic effect. Marston's contributions to the development of a systolic blood pressure-based deception test and his DISC personality ideas get mentioned, but they aren't explored with the nuance a psychology nerd would crave. If you take the film as a character-driven drama inspired by real people, it’s compelling and emotionally true in many ways. If you're chasing strict accuracy, pair it with Jill Lepore's 'The Secret History of Wonder Woman' and a few early comic issues—those readings round out the picture and satisfy that curious itch.

I get a little giddy whenever Marston's other life pops up in conversations about comics: he patented his version of a lie detector in 1915. Back then it wasn't the flashy multi-sensor polygraph we picture in movies, but a systolic blood pressure test he developed to spot deception by monitoring cardiovascular changes when people lied. I like thinking about him in two hats at once — the psychologist tinkering with physiological measures and the creative mind who would later create 'Wonder Woman'. That patent in 1915 set off a chain where others built on his ideas (adding respiration and skin conductance) and turned it into the polygraph we know. There's a lot of debate about validity and ethics even now, but that early patent is a neat historical anchor for both science and pop culture curiosities.

Growing up with stacks of vintage comics and a college course on early 20th-century media, I got obsessed with the contradictions around William Moulton Marston. On one hand, he absolutely pushed a progressive image into mainstream comics: he created 'Wonder Woman' as an explicitly feminist hero who championed truth, compassion, and female leadership at a time when most heroes were macho men. He wrote essays and promotional material arguing that women had moral strengths and that female characters could model a better society. His life—living openly in a relationship with two partners, both women who deeply influenced the character—also informed that feminist streak. Yet, I also see the strange, uncomfortable layers. Marston’s work is peppered with bondage imagery and a bizarre fixation on submission and dominance framed as therapeutic or educational. Some of his rhetoric feels paternalistic, wrapped in moralizing language and a desire to steer readers toward his psychological theories. So yes, he supported female empowerment, but it was entangled with his own ideology: part liberation, part control. That messy mix is why 'Wonder Woman' has remained fascinating and disputed, and why I still find her origin story worth debating over coffee with friends.

There’s something wildly magnetic about how a single life can steer an entire medium, and William Moulton Marston’s did exactly that. He came from a curious mix of psychology, invention, and unconventional relationships — a PhD-driven thinker who helped develop early lie-detection methods and the DISC personality model. Those scientific obsessions seep into the pages: truth, emotional persuasion, and the ethics of power are constant threads in 'Wonder Woman'. Beyond theory, his personal life colored the art. Living with Elizabeth Holloway and Olive Byrne in a nontraditional family relationship shaped his ideas about women’s strength and intimacy; Olive’s distinctive bracelets and Elizabeth’s intellect fed directly into Diana’s design and persona. That intimacy produced a heroine who was meant to teach, guide, and challenge masculine norms. But it also introduced bondage imagery and ideas of loving submission — elements that made the strip both radical and controversial. So his influence is twofold: he birthed one of comics’ first truly feminist icons and he forced the medium to wrestle with sexuality, psychology, and censorship. Modern creators keep picking at those threads, reworking, critiquing, and honoring the contradictions he left behind.

It's wild to think how one person can ripple through so many corners of pop culture. For me, Marston's legacy starts and ends with 'Wonder Woman'—that character he co-created is like a living, evolving argument about power, femininity, and morality. I found an old 'Sensation Comics' issue at a garage sale and was struck by the mix: Amazonian strength and idealism standing beside some very weird bondage imagery that clearly came from Marston's own ideas about affection, dominance, and emotional honesty. What makes his imprint stick is contradiction. He pushed for a female superhero who was compassionate, capable, and morally upstanding long before that was standard. At the same time, his fascination with restraint and the psych theories that led to the lie detector test show up in visual tropes that have been read as fetishistic. Watching 'Professor Marston and the Wonder Women' later gave me a humanized view of his life and relationships, which complicated the picture further. So his legacy is both a feminist milestone and an ongoing debate—one I still find fascinating when flipping through old panels or seeing Gal Gadot bring 'Wonder Woman' to a modern audience.

I've been digging into Marston for years, and if you want a solid starting point read Jill Lepore's 'The Secret History of Wonder Woman' — it’s the most thorough popular biography that places William Moulton Marston in the context of early 20th-century feminism, psychology, and comics. Lepore traces his life, his relationship with Elizabeth Holloway Marston and Olive Byrne, and how those personal dynamics fed into the creation of Wonder Woman. For primary-source balance, I always go back to Marston’s own book 'Emotions of Normal People' (1928). It’s dense and very of its time, but it reveals the psychological theories that underpinned his later comic work. If you want a more comics-oriented overview that covers creators and publication history, Les Daniels’ 'Wonder Woman: The Complete History' gives useful background and places Marston’s output in the Golden Age timeline. Between those three, you’ll get biography, intellectual context, and comic-era specifics — and after that, academic articles and the film 'Professor Marston and the Wonder Women' make for interesting supplemental viewing.