The spiritualist movement began in the 1840s, when holding a séance was the most common way to attempt to contact spirits, usually through a medium. This was about 100 years before audio recording technology was invented. As technology evolved, so did the methods used to attempt to contact spirits.

The first radio transmission had been made by the Italian inventor, Guglielmo Marconi, in 1895, and by the early 1900s, the possibility that radio-based equipment could be used to contact the dead was being explored.

Father Roberto Landell de Mour, a Brazilian Catholic priest and inventor, who was an early pioneer in long-range radio broadcasting and voice transmission technologies, was the first to experiment with electronic spirit communication. In 1910, it's said that he laid the groundwork for future generations of ITC researchers when he demonstrated a device that produced EVPs through radio technology.

Landell's work is little more than a legend, and very...