• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 865 0

in clandestine manuscripts, like the alchemists’. Now code making emerged into the light, exposed in the hardware of commerce, inspiring the popular imagination. In the succeeding decades, many other schemes were contrived and published. They ranged from penny pamphlets to volumes of hundreds of pages of densely packed type. From London came E. Erskine Scott’s Three Letter Code for Condensed Telegraphic and Inscrutably Secret Messages and Correspondence. Scott was an actuary and accountant and, like so many in the code business, a man evidently driven by an obsession with data. The telegraph opened up a world of possibilities for such people—cataloguers and taxonomists, wordsmiths and numerologists, completists of all kinds. Scott’s chapters included not only a vocabulary of common words and two-word combinations, but also geographic names, Christian names, names of all shares quoted on the London Stock Exchange, all the days in the year, all regiments belonging to the British army, registries of shipping, and the names of all the peers of the realm. Organizing and numbering all this data made possible a form of compression, too. Shortening messages meant saving money. Customers found that the mere substitution of numbers for words helped little if at all: it cost just as much to send “3747” as “azotite.” So code books became phrase books. Their object was a sort of packing of messages into capsules, impenetrable to prying eyes and suitable for efficient transmission. And of course, at the recipient’s end, for unpacking.

An especially successful volume in the 1870s and ’80s was The A B C Universal Commercial Electric Telegraphic Code, devised by William Clauson-Thue.♦ He advertised his code to “financiers, merchants, shipowners, brokers, agents, &c.” His motto: “Simplicity and Economy Palpable, Secrecy Absolute.” Clauson-Thue, another information obsessive, tried to arrange the entire language—or at least the language of commerce—into phrases, and to organize the phrases by keyword. The result is a peculiar lexicographic achievement, a window into a nation’s economic life, and a trove of odd nuance and unwitting lyricism. For the keyword panic (assigned numbers 10054–10065), the inventory includes:

A great panic prevails in ———

The panic is settling down

The panic still continues

The worst of the panic is over

The panic may be considered over

For rain (11310–11330):

Cannot work on account of rain

The rain has done much good

The rain has done a great amount of damage

The rain is now pouring down in good earnest

Every prospect of the rain continuing

Rain much needed

Rain at times

Rainfall general

For wreck (15388–15403):

Parted from her anchors and became a wreck

I think it best to sell the wreck as it lies

Every attention will be made to save wreck

Must become a total wreck

Customs authorities have sold the wreck

Consul has engaged men to salve wreck

The world being full of things as well as words, he endeavored, too, to assign numbers to as many proper names as he could list: names of railways, banks, mines, commodities, vessels, ports, and stocks (British, colonial, and foreign).

As the telegraph networks spread under the oceans and across the globe, and international tariffs ran to many dollars per word, the code books thrived. Economy mattered even more than secrecy. The original trans-Atlantic rate was about one hundred dollars for a message—a “cable,” as it was metonymically called—of ten words. For not much less, messages could travel between England and India, by way of Turkey or Persia and Russia. To save on the tariff, clever middlemen devised a practice called “packing.” A packer would collect, say, four messages of five words each and bundle them into a fixed-price telegram of twenty words. The code books got bigger and they got smaller. In 1885 W. H. Beer & Company in Covent Garden published a popular Pocket Telegraphic Code, price one penny, containing “more than 300 one-word telegrams,” neatly organized by subject