Roberto Landell de Moura

Roberto Landell de Moura, Brazilian priest inventor, carried out the first transmission of human voice and musical sounds by radio waves in human history.

The Radio was born in an unlikely place, far from the science centers of the time. This happened in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, on July 16, 1899, thanks to that priest who worked alone and with limited financial resources, in an improvised laboratory in the churches where he worked.

At the age of 16, he had already demonstrated his talent for communications: he built a telephone in 1877, just one year after Graham Bell! When he went to Rome to study Theology, he took the opportunity to study Physics and Chemistry at the Gregorian University, what gave him the knowledge necessary to create new things.

Father Landell patented inventions in Brazil (1901) and in the United States (1904): the Wave Transmitter, the Wireless Telephone and the Wireless Telegraph. From 1901 to 1904 he lived in New York, where he began designing television – decades before other scientists – and recommended the use of short waves to increase the transmission distance – something that had not yet been considered.

Since the end of the 19th century, when there were only wired devices, the inventor and priest said that interplanetary communications would be feasible one day. In 1902, he declared to The New York Herald that the range of wireless transmissions would be “practically infinite”. The following year, Marconi, who was already famous worldwide for radiotelegraphy, stated in an interview with The Evening World that voice technology would only be useful for “short distances” and that he did not believe in its improvement.

Father Landell wanted to merge science and religion. He believed that his discoveries were “a gift from God”, but he ended up involved in the centuries-old conflict between obscurantism and science: his devices were destroyed in Brazil by people who accused him of having a pact with the devil.

Roberto Landell de Moura lived ahead of his time and his trajectory was full of challenges, victories, misunderstandings, and injustices. However, nothing can overshadow the fact that he was one of the pioneers of the wireless era, the scientist who inaugurated voice and music transmissions by radio waves.

Hamilton Almeida