The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1905-12-28
CURIOUS FACTS
ABOUT LANGUAGE
Some Things Discovered by Scholarly
Brooklyn Man.
SCIENCE OF CRYPT0GRAPHY
SECRET CODES OF LOVERS EASY
TO READ.

There is a man in Brooklyn schol-
arly, modest man-Who, II he would
permit it, might become as famous in
the realm OF fact as Sherlock Holmes
has become in fiction. l have argued
with him by the hour in hope of in
ducing him to let me be his ''Dr. Wat
son." but he is immOvable in his de-
termination not to be ''paraded in pub
lie" as he puts it.
As long ago as when Ignatius Don
nelly promulgated his ingenious key
to Lord BacOns alleged cryptogram in
the 1923 edition of Shakespeare plays
that was in the eighties-this Brook
Ign man became profoundly interested
in deciphering secret writings. He had
always had g fondness for solving puZ-
Zles Of all sorts, and was eXtraordi-
narily successful at it, but Donnelly's
argument set him off into systematic
study Of cryptography, and he has pur-
sued it with increasing interest ever
since, until now 1t is we'll night impos-
sible for the ordinary mind to invent a
code which he cannot decipher.
Very few of the codes invented by
lovers who correspond through the per-
sonal columns of the newspapers are
at all difficult to read" says he. I'm
the first place the inventors usually
know nothing Of cryptography, with its
thousand and one exposures of ordinary
mental processes. Then, being lovers,
they are apt to say too much (yOu
know a lover always likes to add one
more word of love). and one extra word
may furnish the key to the whole
cipher scheme.
For example" he continued, taking
down book In which he had carefully
tabulated and indexed all the many
various forms of cipher he had diScOV-
cred and deciphered, here is a bit of
correspondence which the merest tyrO
can read" He showed me some thirty
odd clippings, covering a period Of al
most two years. These are messages
Of man and woman who think their
little affair is safely guarded by their
code. 1t is the crudest form of cipher
writing, but even if it were the best
possible code it would be easy to read,
for they can't stop when they have said
their say. It is not necessary to de
cipher these messages. One has only
TO read them off. They are as clear as
anything else in the paper"
I confessed that there were many
things which I could read much more
readily than these messages, crude
though they might be.
why look at this sentence" said he.
'Tt is as plain as a pikestaff That one
sentence gives away the whole cipher
scheme and makes the rest easy ia
read"
The sentence in question was a mere
tumble of letters to me. 1t ran thus:
r byri oys 40 jmvbezg.
Now. then" said he, "hOw many
words are there in the English Ian
guage that are spelled with one letter."
I could recall only the indefinite ar
tiele "a" the interjection "O'' and the
pronoun ct"
THAT is all there are" said he; land
even the 90 is not commonly used. It
is generally written on So, for spec
ulative purposes We may assume that
in this code f. stands for either "A or
II Now, let us apply a few simple
tests to ascertain which Of these it is.
The first thing that nearly all meXpert
minds think of when they undertake to
invent a code is to turn the alphabet
upside down, using u for "A 'Y' for
b. and so on. But, that cannot be the
scheme of this code, for. if it were. e
would stand for r. BY this process
of elimination we might proceed until
We hit upon a scheme that would make
f. stand for either A or T. but there
is a short cut which the student Of
cryptography soon learns to take. The
human mind operates along certain
lines almost as inevitably as the moon
follows it's course The person who
wishes to do something a little more
complex than merely upSetting the al
phabet generally divides it into blocks
of letters, and then transpOses the let
tiers Of each block. Therefore, let us
begin by dividing the alphabet into
only two blocks, thus:
"ABCDEFGHIJKLM
NOPQRSTUVWXYZ
"Now, both "A and II ere in the first
block, in which M stands for A Il
for B. X for C. j. for D. and r for
e. or e for t. and that is what we
are looking for Now. you can read
the message, can't yOu?"
/ tried it along the lines he had sug-
gested. The second word. 'byri.' worked
out thus: "B," being second in the first
block Of thirteen letters, stood for the
second one from the other end of that
block, which was L." "Y," being next
to the last letter In the second block,
stood for the next TO the first letter in
that block. and this was 90" "R." be-
ing the fifth in the second block, stood
for ''V," which was fifth from the other
end of the same block. And IT. (ffth
from the end of the first block) stood
for CO. (ffth from the beginning Of the
same DiOCk). ms gave US the words
'T love" and made It reasonably GER
tain that we had found the right key.
So, proceeding by the same method, I
easily translated the whole sentence
thus:
Z byri oys so jmvbezg
I love you my darling.
In this code. it viii be noted, CO.
and CT being in the middle of their
respective blocks. are not changed
Now" said my friend II can show
you why they divided the alphabet into
blocks instead of using the simpler
form of merely upsetting 1t. In invent
ing their code they probably first used
the simpler form, but they soon found
that their pet word, love did not work
out very we'll under that system"
He wrote the alphabet forward and
backward. thus:
A B c D 2 r G II I X L NJ
ZYXWV " T S r Q pom
n OP Q r S ~ WXYZ
NIL j H G FED c BA
There you have the interchangeable
letters In pairs" he continued. Now
write the word love in this code and
you have 'olev' 1t happens that the
some letters are in the code word as in
the original. They are merely mixed UP
a bit. When our lovers tried this and
found that their favorite word was not
very successfully disguised. they
their scheme to the more COM
pick one, I fancy"
"And you sat here and read all their