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By Root 857 0

matter. Essential subjects were Betting (“To what amount shall I back for you at present odds?”), Bootmaker (“These boots don’t fit, send for them directly”), Washerwoman (“Call for the washing to-day”), and Weather—In Connexion with Voyages (“It is far too rough for you to cross to-day”). And a blank page was provided for “Secret Code. (Fill up by arrangement with friends.)” There were specialized codes for railways and yachts and trades from pharmacist to carpetmaker. The grandest and most expensive code books borrowed freely from one another. “It has been brought to the Author’s knowledge that some persons have purchased a single copy of the ‘A B C Telegraphic Code’ for service in compiling Codes of their own,”♦ complained Clauson-Thue. “The Author would intimate that such an operation is a breach of the Copyright Act, and liable to become a matter of legal and unpleasant procedure.” This was just bluster. By the turn of the century, the world’s telegraphers, through the medium of International Telegraphic Conferences held in Berne and in London, had systematized codes with words in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, and Spanish. The code books prospered and expanded through the first decades of the twentieth century and then vanished into obscurity.

Those who used the telegraph codes slowly discovered an unanticipated side effect of their efficiency and brevity. They were perilously vulnerable to the smallest errors. Because they lacked the natural redundancy of English prose—even the foreshortened prose of telegraphese—these cleverly encoded messages could be disrupted by a mistake in a single character. By a single dot, for that matter. For example, on June 16, 1887, a Philadelphia wool dealer named Frank Primrose telegraphed his agent in Kansas to say that he had bought—abbreviated in their agreed code as BAY—500,000 pounds of wool. When the message arrived, the key word had become BUY. The agent began buying wool, and before long the error cost Primrose $20,000, according to the lawsuit he filed against the Western Union Telegraph Company. The legal battle dragged on for six years, until finally the Supreme Court upheld the fine print on the back of the telegraph blank, which spelled out a procedure for protecting against errors:

To guard against mistakes or delays, the sender of a message should order it REPEATED; that is telegraphed back to the originating office for comparison.… Said company shall not be liable for mistakes in … any UNREPEATED message … nor in any case for errors in cipher or obscure messages.♦

The telegraph company had to tolerate ciphers but did not have to like them. The court found in favor of Primrose in the amount of $1.15, the price of sending the telegram.

Secret writing was as old as writing. When writing began, it was in itself secret to all but the few. As the mystery dissolved, people found new ways to keep their words privileged and recondite. They rearranged words into anagrams. They reversed their script in the mirror. They invented ciphers.

In 1641, just as the English Civil War began, an anonymous little book catalogued the many known methods of what it called “cryptographia.” These included special paper and ink:♦ the juice of lemons or onions, raw egg, or “the distilled Juice of Gloworms,” which might or might not be visible in the dark. Alternatively, writing could be obscured by substituting letters for other letters, or inventing new symbols, or writing from right to left, or “transposing each Letter, according to some unusual Order, as, suppose the first Letter should be at the latter End of the Line, the second at the Beginning, or the like.” Or a message could be written across two lines:

T e o l i r a e l m s f m s e s p l u o w e u t e l

h s u d e s r a l o t a i h d, u p y s r e m s y i d

The Souldiers are allmost famished, supply us or wee must yeild.

Through transposition and substitution of letters, the Romans and the Jews had devised other methods, more intricate and thus more obscure.

This little book was titled