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The Minnesota Science Museum houses one of the strangest devices ever This is an absolutely bizarre design. Thanks to modern technologies, we can "revive" this unique object. This is a psychograph. Made up of nearly 2,000 individual parts, it looks like some kind of robotic hair dryer. A dome, connected to a mahogany wooden box, descends from a stand overhead Inside the dome are 32 small steel probes on hinges. They are designed to fit snugly against the skull. The creator claims that it allows you to accurately calculate your psychological strengths and weaknesses.
It is supposedly able to reveal not only what kind of person you are, but also what kind of job you should choose. When he is introduced to the public, he becomes a sensation and people line up to get their heads checked. But can it really work? Where did this idea even come from? And how did a scientific instrument end up in a shopping mall? Inventor and self-proclaimed deep thinker Henry Charles Lavery begins work on a revolutionary machine project. Lavery was an ordinary auto mechanic by profession, but he had big dreams. He gained fame as the "Thomas Edison of Superior ", Wisconsin.
Lavery believes that this new machine will change the world because it will be able to read and assess a person's personality. The premise of this device was that it could measure the shape of the head and produce a result based on the deviations in the measurements, which would reveal a person's character and intelligence. The basis is the idea that certain thoughts, attitudes, behavior patterns, and talents are linked to brain structures. In 1931, almost 30 years after Lavery first had the idea, he presented the finished machine. He chooses a catchy name and calls
it "psychograph." Where did he get the idea for such a bizarre device? Ancient Greece, over 2000 years ago. Philosophers such as Pythagoras and Aristotle championed the idea that a person can indeed be judged by their appearance. This is called physiognomy. Physiognomy is the belief that there is a direct connection between a person's appearance and their inner intellectual abilities and character. It sounds crazy, but it's something each of us does without realizing it. People like to jump to conclusions quickly. And one of the easiest ways to do this is to look at someone, assess how pleasing their appearance is to you, and then draw many other
conclusions about them based on that. This is normal behavior for humans, even if it is not always accurate. It is not surprising that the popularity of physiognomy has grown over the centuries, giving rise to some very strange ideas. In the 16th century, the Italian scientist Giambattista della Porta wrote the book " Human Physiognomy ", where he compared the features of the human face with the signs of various animal species. He suggested that there were similarities between these two types particularly behavioral ones. For example, he argued that if a person is like a sheep, then their character is the same. An animal he considered stupid and mean. The psychograph is based on the development of this idea, first proposed in the 18th
century by the German physiologist Franz Joseph Halle. Gall's ideas arose from his own school experiences: he noticed that classmates with bulging eyes and high foreheads had the best memories. Gall concluded that there must be some kind of memory organ in the skull behind the eyes, which causes this bulge. Gall determined that the brain was divided into 27 independent areas. Gall believed that the brain was actually a composite organ. That it is made up of many smaller organs, each of which controls certain aspects of our character, personality, and behavior. And the sizes of these areas indicate how strongly
each of these traits is expressed Gall believed that the larger the area, the more it changes the shape of the skull, creating protrusions on the surface that can be measured. This is exactly what the psychograph does with its tiny levers. At the beginning of the 19th century, Gall's idea received a scientific name- phrenology. Measuring the head with a huge compass has become a real trend among the elite of European high society. And in America, brothers Lorenzo and Orson Fowler turned it into a business empire. The Fowler brothers created a phrenological office. They collected thousands of skulls of questionable individuals-from notorious criminals to pirates. They offered services to the general public: people came and paid to learn
about their character from the shape of their skull. Phrenology attracted celebrities such as American poet Walt Whitman, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and inventor Thomas Edison. However, the idea behind the psychograph also has a dark side. Fowler brothers' collection was one that belonged to the Apache chief Mangas Coloradas, who was first tortured and then killed by American soldiers. And they argued that this revealed Native American traits that distinguished them from white European settlers. So the entire science of phrenology was closely tied to this deeply racist underpinning of views on human races.
Ignoring these disturbing controversies, inventor Henry Lavery sees a business opportunity. He's going to sell phrenology to companies so they can select the perfect employees. But the old-fashioned manual approach doesn't fit well with his new business model. First of all, it was time-consuming, but perhaps more importantly, it was very subjective. His idea was to create a device that could automate this process. It can do it faster, more accurately, and more consistently. Thus, the psychographer was born. Lavery claims that his fancy new device can take accurate measurements in just 90 seconds. But did he really create a machine capable of doing this?
