Believe it or not, famed inventor Thomas Edison was one of the first people to experiment with EVP. In the early 1920s, his mother was critically ill, and Edison began trying to devise a method of speaking to her after her death. In the midst of his planning, his mother died. With his assistant, Dr. Miller Hutchinson, Edison began construction of a device that he would later call the Thomas Edison Communicator. He wrote, “If our personality survives, then it is strictly logical or scientific to assume that it retains memory, intellect, other faculties, and knowledge that we acquire on this Earth. Therefore … if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument, when made available, ought to record something.” Unfortunately, Edison did not complete his invention before his death in 1931. Others have since completed his invention to the best of their abilities, but it isn’t really known how he truly intended the finished product to work.
In 1959, a simple task of taping birds’ songs led to an unexpected odyssey of EVP. A Swedish film producer named Friedrich Jürgenson, when playing back the bird calls, was startled to hear a voice say something about “bird voices in the night” – and even more startled when he heard his own mother’s familiar voice saying, “Friedrich, you are being watched. Friedel, my little Friedel, can you hear me?” This made a complete believer out of Jürgenson, and he devoted much time after that first discovery to recording EVP. He recorded hundreds of voices, played his tapes at international press conferences and eventually wrote two books: Voices from the Universe and Radio Contact with the Dead. His research and enthusiasm for the subject of EVP earned him the title “The Father of EVP” after his death.