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By Root 881 0

and game players, mathematically or poetically inclined. They analyzed ancient methods of secret writing and invented new ones. Theorists debated who should prevail, the best code maker or the best code breaker. The great American popularizer of cryptography was Edgar Allan Poe. In his fantastic tales and magazine essays he publicized the ancient art and boasted of his own skill as a practitioner. “We can scarcely imagine a time when there did not exist a necessity, or at least a desire,”♦ he wrote in Graham’s Magazine in 1841, “of transmitting information from one individual to another, in such manner as to elude general comprehension.” For Poe, code making was more than just a historical or technical enthusiasm; it was an obsession. It reflected his sense of how we communicate our selves to the world. Code makers and writers are trafficking in the same goods. “The soul is a cypher, in the sense of a cryptograph; and the shorter a cryptograph is, the more difficulty there is in comprehension,”♦ he wrote. Secrecy was in Poe’s nature; he preferred mystery to transparency.

“Secret intercommunication must have existed almost contemporaneously with the invention of letters,” he declared. This was for Poe a bridge between science and the occult, between the rational mind and the savant.♦ To analyze cryptography—“a serious thing, as the means of imparting information”—required a special form of mental power, a penetrating mind, and might well be taught in academies. He said again and again that “a peculiar mental action is called into play.” He published as challenges to his readers a series of substitution ciphers.

Along with Poe, Jules Verne and Honoré de Balzac also introduced ciphers into their fiction. In 1868, Lewis Carroll had a card printed on two sides with what he called “The Telegraph-Cipher,” which employed a “key-alphabet” and a “message-alphabet,”♦ to be transposed according to a secret word agreed on by the correspondents and carried in their memories. But the most advanced cryptanalyst in Victorian England was Charles Babbage. The process of substituting symbols, crossing levels of meaning, lay near the heart of so many issues. And he enjoyed the challenge. “One of the most singular characteristics of the art of deciphering,” he asserted, “is the strong conviction possessed by every person, even moderately acquainted with it, that he is able to construct a cipher which nobody else can decipher. I have also observed that the cleverer the person, the more intimate is his conviction.”♦ He believed that himself, at first, but later switched to the side of the code breakers. He planned an authoritative work to be known as The Philosophy of Decyphering but never managed to complete it. He did solve, among others, a polyalphabetic cipher known as the Vigenère, le chiffre indéchiffrable, thought to be the most secure in Europe.♦ As in his other work, he applied algebraic methods, expressing cryptanalysis in the form of equations. Even so, he remained a dilettante and knew it.

When Babbage attacked cryptography with a calculus, he was employing the same tools he had explored more conventionally in their home, mathematics, and less conventionally in the realm of machinery, where he created a symbolism for the moving parts of gears and levers and switches. Dionysius Lardner had said of the mechanical notation, “The various parts of the machinery being once expressed on paper by proper symbols, the enquirer dismisses altogether from his thoughts the mechanism itself and attends only to the symbols … an almost metaphysical system of abstract signs, by which the motion of the hand performs the office of the mind.”♦ Two younger Englishmen, Augustus De Morgan and George Boole, turned the same methodology to work on an even more abstract material: the propositions of logic. De Morgan was Babbage’s friend and Ada Byron’s tutor and a professor at University College, London. Boole was the son of a Lincolnshire cobbler and a lady’s maid and became, by the 1840s, a professor at Queen’s College, Cork. In 1847 they published separately