“Drink more Ovaltine”
In the back of 19th century Stevens gun catalogs I’ve found a couple of pages of telegraph code to be used by dealers for ordering.
“Bismark Omit leafage buck bank.”
Yawn, another Heels Up Harris speech. Or is that a Bidensky speech? It’s hard to tell the difference these days.
Very fascinating story. It’s interesting the lengths they went to to reduce the number of Morris Code transmitted characters (by using code words) to effectively increase the baud rate. It’s a code within a code.
“The dress does offer a possible hint: a label that reads “Bennett.”
Jane Austen’s book Pride & Prejudice (the main family is named Bennet) was involved in the espionage! Look there for additional clues.
Calgary, Cuba, unguard, confute, duck, fagan
Spring, wilderness, lining, one, reading, novice.
For a minute there, I thought I was reading a Joe Biden speech...
Kudos to our amazing code breakers and their hard work!
I thought the cryptogram ping list might like this. Sorry if any consider it to be spam.
You could spend many minutes (maybe hours) paging through the code book to compose a message that will save your employer a few cents. Was labor really that cheap then?
There is an interesting distinction between a code and a cipher. This is an example of a code: It operates on words and phrases. Commercial codes were common, and not used for privacy but economy. Ciphers operate on smaller units of the messages, in the case of most World War II era ciphers like enigma, individual letters. Today at the bit level.
The famous Zimmerman Telegram was first encoded then enciphered. For background: The Zimmerman Telegram was an offer by the German foreign minister, Zimmerman, to the Mexican government, offering to aid Mexico in recovering territory lost to the United States, if Mexico joined the war against the United States in the event that the United States entered the Great War on the side of the Allies.
Shortly after the War started Great Britain had severed the German submarine cables to North America, so they had no way of sending telegrams to their Embassy in Mexico. President Wilson was interested in further peace negotiations, and the German foreign ministry prevailed on the U.S. to allow Germany to send telegrams to Washington, in code, using the facilities of the American embassies in Berlin, Bern, and London. The Americans agreed. (Jimmy Carter, anyone?)
The British, who were monitoring U.S. Embassy telegrams, unbeknownst to the Americans, were surprised to see German diplomatic ciphers passing in and out of it, but delighted by the contents. British cryptographers had broken German diplomatic codes and could readily read the messages.
This presented a dilemma for the British. They did not want to admit to eavesdropping on American diplomatic traffic, but at the same time did not want to pass up such a golden opportunity. They hit on an ingenious solution: burglary! They planted a spy in the German embassy in Mexico City who purloined the decoded telegram, complete with routing information through London and Washington. The British “alerted” the American government and the American press. A pro-German American correspondent in Berlin (CNN, anyone?) invited Zimmerman to denounce the telegram as British fabrication. Zimmerman declined, perhaps anticipating the next chapter of the story.
Since the telegram had been transmitted through the American embassy in London, there was an encrypted copy on file. The British allowed an American naval signals officer into their chamber noir, where they attacked foreign communications. They gave him a copy of their reconstruction of the German codes and ciphers and allowed him to decrypt the German telegram sent through the American embassy. He was sworn to secrecy about the existence of the chamber noir, and the code books, but he could honestly publicly announce that he had decrypted the telegram himself, and that the telegram that Britain had pilfered from Germany in Mexico was genuine.
The Germans’ use of American diplomatic channels, under the guise of seeking peace to try to forge an alliance against America outraged American public opinion and contributed to the American entry into the Great War.
Ping!.………..