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By Root 1035 0

tried to push back, on the grounds that private codes were gaming the system, but ciphers flourished. One typical system assigned dictionary words to whole phrases, organizing them semantically and alphabetically. For example, all words starting with B referred to the flour market: baal = “The transactions are smaller than yesterday”; babble = “There is a good business doing”; baby = “Western is firm, with moderate demand for home trade and export”; button = “market quiet and prices easier.” It was necessary, of course, for sender and recipient to work from identical word lists. To the telegraph operators themselves, the encoded messages looked like nonsense, and that, in itself, proved an extra virtue.

As soon as people conceived of sending messages by telegraph, they worried that their communication was exposed to the world—at the very least, to the telegraph operators, unreliable strangers who could not help but read the words they fed through their devices. Compared to handwritten letters, folded and sealed with wax, the whole affair seemed public and insecure—the messages passing along those mysterious conduits, the electric wires. Vail himself wrote in 1847, “The great advantage which this telegraph possesses in transmitting messages with the rapidity of lightning, annihilating time and space, would perhaps be much lessened in its usefulness, could it not avail itself of the application of a secret alphabet.”♦ There were, he said, “systems”—

by which a message may pass between two correspondents, through the medium of the telegraph, and yet the contents of that message remain a profound secret to all others, not excepting the operators of the telegraphic stations, through whose hands it must pass.

This was all very difficult. The telegraph served not just as a device but as a medium—a middle, intermediary state. The message passes through this medium. Distinct from the message, one must also consider the contents of that message. Even when the message must be exposed, the contents could be concealed. Vail explained what he meant by secret alphabet: an alphabet whose characters have been “transposed and interchanged.”

Then the representative of a, in the permanent alphabet, may be represented by y, or c, or x, in the secret alphabet; and so of every other letter.

Thus, “The firm of G. Barlow & Co. have failed” becomes “Ejn stwz ys & qhwkyf p iy jhan shtknr.” For less sensitive occasions, Vail proposed using abbreviated versions of common phrases. Instead of “give my love to,” he suggested sending “gmlt.” He offered a few more suggestions:

mhii My health is improving

shf Stocks have fallen

ymir Your message is received

wmietg When may I expect the goods?

wyegfef Will you exchange gold for eastern funds?

All these systems required prearrangement between sender and recipient: the message was to be supplemented, or altered, by preexisting knowledge shared at both ends. A convenient repository for this knowledge was a code book, and when the first Morse line opened for business, one of its key investors and promoters, the Maine congressman Francis O. J. Smith, known as Fog, produced one: The Secret Corresponding Vocabulary;♦ adapted for use to Morse’s Electro-Magnetic Telegraph: and also in conducting written correspondence, transmitted by the mails, or otherwise. It was nothing but a numbered, alphabetical list of 56,000 English words, Aaronic to zygodactylous, plus instructions. “We will suppose the person writing, and the person written to, are each in possession of a copy of this work,” Smith explained. “Instead of sending their communications in words, they send numbers only, or partly in numbers, and partly in words.” For greater security, they might agree in advance to add or subtract a private number of their own choosing, or different numbers for alternate words. “A few such conventional substitutes,” he promised, “will render the whole language a perfectly dead letter to all persons not conusant to the concerted arrangement.”

Cryptographers had a mysterious history, their secrets handed along