People were first led to believe that the machine's purpose was to rate stress. It had previously been determined that the pupils would dilate in relation to the amount of interest in the picture, in a technique termed 'the pupillary response test'. The pictures ranged from the mundane to sexually explicit photos of men and women.
It had a pulley with a camera going towards the pupils, with a black box located in front of it that displayed pictures. The machine used a chair similar to that used by dentists. Although funding for the project was cut off in the late 1960s, the investigations continued, and the RCMP collected files on 9,000 people who had been investigated. A substantial number of workers did lose their jobs. The machine was employed in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s during a campaign to eliminate all gay men from the civil service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and the military. The subjects were made to view pornography the device then measured the diameter of the pupils of the eyes (pupillary response test), perspiration, and pulse for a supposed erotic response. The ' fruit machine' was a device developed in Canada by Frank Robert Wake in the 1950s that was supposed to be able to identify gay men (derogatorily referred to as ' fruits').
Device that could purportedly identify homosexual men
