Thanks BenLurkin. Sounds like a good summer project.
Posted on 07/03/2016 11:32:13 AM PDT by BenLurkin
The Wall Street Journal reported on a trove of Civil War era telegrams — many of them to and from Abraham Lincoln — that have never been decoded.
The telegrams are owned by the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. They have started a project, "Decoding the Civil War," to transcribe and decipher their collection of nearly 16,000 Civil War telegrams between Lincoln, his Cabinet and Union Army officers. About a third of the telegrams were written in code.
The library is crowdsourcing the project through the largest online platform for collaborative volunteer research, Zooniverse. They hope about 75,000 volunteers will sign up and make quick work of the deciphering.
...
The Civil War telegrams at the Huntington Library are not in Morse code. They are the original transcriptions. All of them will in turn be transcribed onto computers to create a searchable database. In addition, there are several code books which should help to decipher at least some of the coded telegrams. It's also possible they'll discover something else; like they really aren't in code.
Since the telegrams are essentially gibberish, there is no way of knowing whether they were properly transcribed to start with.
(Excerpt) Read more at vcstar.com ...
Too bad we don’t have an agency dedicated to code breaking. Ohe wait, we do. But it’s too busy missing terrorists, chasing Snowden for explaining their illegal domestic spying, and would be thrown into paralytic shock that something from the 1860s might not be politically correct.
The government has cash to study lesbianism in Oregon bullfrog, but something like this, they are suddenly budget hawks.
NO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE JOKES
Pleaze
Back then, gentlemen did not read each other’s mail
Ok, but i wonder if any of them say “John has a long mustache”.
So they’re “owned” by an organization in Kaliforniastan
Why crowd source it? If you have they key, give it to one programmer with a few good servers.
"Send more Chuck Berry!"
Maybe I should re-examine that decrypt key ...
Or perhaps “The dice are on the carpet’’.
SOS,everybody in the army had to know that...
It was breakfast, Sh&#t on a shingle...
“Bring a .38 to the play that night”.
I think one of them said something about Laboulaye’s Lady.
Thanks BenLurkin. Sounds like a good summer project.
I’ve decoded most the telegrams through 1862:
“Attack. Attack! Why is no one attacking??? We have more of everything than they do. Attack ‘em where they ain’t if you’re afraid of casualties! We have a Navy, too! USE IT! KEEP USING IT! ATTACK!!!—A. Lincoln.”
Thanks for this. Looking into it right now.
sounds really goofy to me. They never were decoded?
how could you send some one a message if you weren’t sure they would be able to decode it so they could respond best?
They must have had huge communication issues during the war.
Huntington built the Southern Pacific. His library and garden are used by scholars.
sounds really goofy to me. They never were decoded?
how could you send some one a message if you weren’t sure they would be able to decode it so they could respond best?
They only have the originals.
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