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.
Heliograph
The German professor Carl Friedrich Gauss of the University of Göttingen developed and used a predecessor of the heliograph (the heliotrope) in 1821. His device directed a controlled beam of sunlight to a distant station to be used as a marker for geodetic survey work, and was suggested as a means of telegraphic communications. This is the first reliably documented heliographic device, despite much speculation about possible ancient incidents of sun-flash signalling, and the documented existence of other forms of ancient optical telegraphy.