10 More Inventors Who Hated Their Own Creations
4. John Augustus Larson - The Polygraph
The modern polygraph, otherwise known as a lie detector, was first created by Dr. John Augustus Larson in 1921. Not only was Dr. Larson a gifted forensic scientist, he was also a police officer and the first in American history to hold an academic doctorate. He worked for the Berkeley Police Department in California and came to hate his invention.
Over the course of a 15-year career, Larson used his polygraph, which he called the cardio-pneumo psychogram, to solve hundreds of cases. It was even named one of the greatest inventions ever made in the Encyclopaedia Britannica's list of 325 Greatest Inventions in their 2003 almanac.
Ideally, the lie detector was meant to replace interrogations and even jury deliberations. After all, why bother with any of that nonsense when you could simply pull the truth from a person? It never worked out that way and most of the world has abandoned the devices. In the United States, where they were invented, polygraphs are not admissible in court, which effectively makes them useless for law enforcement.
By the end of his life, Larson came to hate the polygraph even calling it “a Frankenstein’s monster, which I have spent over 40 years in combating.”