The origin of the field of NFRHT is commonly traced to the work of Sergei M. Rytov in the Soviet Union. Rytov examined the case of a semi-infinite absorbing body separated by a vacuum gap from a near-perfect mirror at zero temperature. He treated the source of thermal radiation as randomly fluctuating electromagnetic fields. Later in the United States, various groups theoretically examined the effects of wave interference and evanescent wave tunneling. In 1971, Dirk Polder and Michel Van Hove published the first fully correct formulation of NFRHT between arbitrary non-magnetic media. They examined the case of two half-spaces separated by a small vacuum gap. Polder and Van Hove used the fluctuation-dissipation theorem to determine the statistical properties of the randomly fluctuating currents responsible for thermal emission and demonstrated definitively that evanescent waves were responsible for super-Planckian (exceeding the blackbody limit) heat transfer across small gaps.