Once again I found a fun looking headline that, after further research, uncovers a tiny slice of a deep-rooted social issue today.

It started as a personality test for movie stars. But the following year, Los Angeles police were learning to use it to decide who “looked like a criminal.”

William Edward Benton called it the Bentograph, a "slide rule for reading human character." By turning its overlapping sections, he could make the nose long or stubby and the chin "pugnacious, artistic or receding." Once the profile matched yours, the words exposed around it supposedly revealed your character.

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For Hollywood, it declared Douglas Fairbanks happy-go-lucky and Mary Pickford full of good qualities. It should have remained a novelty.

But instead, in October 1927, Police Commissioner Willard Thorpe brought Benton in to teach 135 officers how to recognize criminals, and even potential criminals, at a glance. Thorpe wanted the Bentograph made regular police equipment. His own quote on the record: "Professor Benton, in analyzing me with his Bentograph, told me the truth about myself."

Five days later, a second, separately syndicated piece ran describing how the machine actually worked. Overlapping wooden panels, "much the same principle as a camera shutter." And one line worth sitting with: it described the device as reading character "almost as accurately as the ablest of physiognomists and phrenologists," the same category of long-discredited pseudoscience that had spent over a century arguing some people were simply born looking more criminal than others.

The newspaper joked that younger detectives might become confused and start arresting one another. They should have just used that same logic to understand what other issues may arise given this type of profiling.

It was Michael-Scott-level naiveté, paired with a device teaching police that criminality could be seen in a face at all. What could go wrong?

Also From The Papers

See you tomorrow. – Chris

Sources

Los Angeles Sunday Times, June 27, 1926
Los Angeles Evening Post-Record, October 4, 1927
Springfield Daily Republican, October 9, 1927