Every evening, Wilmington daily commercial., 1921-04-21
BACON CIPHER SECRET
Barred BY j. OF P. MAN
Amazing knowledge of 18th Cen
tury Work Revealed by Pro-
fessor Newbold's Discovery.
) Aasociated - . 80 IyenLnr

Ry Associated l'reHs to IVery Evening
Philadelphia. April q detailed
description of thu method used in de-
coding the cipher used ~ Roger Bacon.
the thirteenth century philosopher
monk in writing an 500 900 word manu-
script now the property ~ Wnfrid
VI Voynich Of Now York and London.
was given here today before tho Ameri-
can Philosophical Society by Professor
William Romaine Newbold. Of the t'ui-
vcrsity of Pennsylvania
As result II tho revelations made by
dccipherinE the manuscript scientists
have declared Bacon had remarkable
snowicdEe Of mathematical physics as
conceived today The rnanuac ript
proves Il is maintained. that tho Fran
eiscan friar used both the telesc ope and
the microscope. Proof of its nufhcn-
ticity was submitted last night by IDr
\cwboid brfore tho College ri Ply
etcians and Surgeons when he announc-
cd he had dcciphcrcd Ilacon's name on
the last page
In his address today Dr Newbold
pointed out that BACON was obliged be
cause Of the age in which nc lived, 10
devise, a cipher which not only would -
difficult 10 read. hut which no one would
suspect of being a cipher
Bacon conceived the idea Of express
ing every letter of word which he
wanted to write in cipher by a syllable
and building the syllable into a new
word" he said For example IL the
letter c" is represented BY "gr. "a
by ar" and Z" by ed the word
graded would spell cat.
The principal cannot be used in this
way because every word will be repre-
scented by twice as many letters and
only words Of an even number of letters
can b. used in cipher. To meet these
difficulties Bacon lays down the rule
that successive syIiahles must end and
begin with the same letters. doubled
letters being dropped. Thus at may be
spelled 'go-ol-ld. Dropping the double
letters. one gets the word gold
In reading the cipher YOU double
every letter except the first and last and
thus discover the svllables which spell
the word But it is very seldom
possible TO find syllabes which full
nh these conditions and vet spell
a new word when arranged in the
order of the letters OF the original
word For example, cat may also be
spelled ark -da and the syllables may
be arranged into the word dark but
when dark is translated the word cat
will reappear as tea. the order of the
letters being disarranged. These are the
principles Bacon used.
There are asa possible combinations
of the letters OF two twenty-five letter
aiphabets, taken two by two. Bacon
makes every one of the ASA represent
a letter of his alphabet and with them
spells his words in latin in the way in
dicated above. He disarranges the un-
deriving text as little as possible and
unusually it is still recognizable. but
frequently it is disarranged so much
that scholars probably never will agree
as to how it should be reconstructed
"As it is difficult to write when ham
pered by these rules Bacon usually
shields himself from suspicion by writ
ing in the strange jargon used by
aIchemists As few people understooe
il no could write ali kinds Of nonsens,
with no danger of discovery.
Bacon sometimes wrote tiny charac
ters under a microscope concealinl
them in letters Of a bogus alphabet DR.
Newbold said Many of his illustrations
are concealed in the same way ant
unlmportant lines are extremely Difficult
for lie scholar to separate from thos
which form the real drawing Tn
non-signiiicant lines usually arc il
lighter ink.
As evidence of the fact that M
method Of deciphering is correct. DR.
Newbold said he had found therein fact
of which he had no former knowledge
but which he afterward found To n
true. These included the appearance
of a comet on December 5. 1890. am
the location of the great nebula o
Andromeda.