Michael Esposito (paranormal investigator)
Michael Andrew Esposito was born in Gary, Indiana in 1964. He is a descendant of Alfred Vail who invented the Morse Code and several early telegraph devices with his partner Samuel Morse. The invention of the telegraph sparked the spiritualist movement of the middle 1800s and the telegraph was used in spirit communication. Another ancestor, Jonathan Harned Vail was office manager and assistant to Thomas Edison. Edison, in his later years attempted to develop a device for communicating with the dead. Michael studied communication theory at Purdue University, University of Notre Dame, American University in Cairo, Egypt and Governor's State University. During the Gulf War Michael was a Psy-ops officer in Iraq.
Needle telegraph
A needle telegraph is an electrical telegraph that uses indicating needles moved electromagnetically as its means of displaying messages. It is one of the two main types of electromagnetic telegraph, the other being the armature system as exemplified by the telegraph of Samuel Morse in the United States. The principal needle system was the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph, a system widely used in Britain and the British Empire in the 19th and early-20th centuries. However, the earliest needle telegraph was a binary coded multi-wire, multi-needle system invented by Pavel Schilling and demonstrated in St. Petersburg in 1832. Charles Wheatstone may have demonstrated one of Schilling's instruments in 1835 (that is, prior to his collaboration with Cooke to build a telegraph). Cooke definitely saw Schilling's needle instrument at a lecture of Georg Wilhelm Muncke in Heidelberg. It was this lecture that inspired Cooke to attempt building a telegraph, although he did not use needle instruments until Wheatstone came on board and suggested it.