200 Year Old Cipher DeCoded

[3113]

For more than 200 years, buried deep within Thomas Jefferson's correspondence and papers, there lay a mysterious cipher -- a coded message that appears to have remained unsolved. Until now. The cryptic message was sent to President Jefferson in December 1801 by his friend and frequent correspondent, Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. President Jefferson and Mr. Patterson were both officials at the American Philosophical Society -- a group that promoted scholarly research in the sciences and humanities -- and were enthusiasts of ciphers and other codes, regularly exchanging letters about them.

In this message, Mr. Patterson set out to show the president and primary author of the Declaration of Independence what he deemed to be a nearly flawless cipher. "The art of secret writing," or writing in cipher, has "engaged the attention both of the states-man & philosopher for many ages," Mr. Patterson wrote. But, he added, most ciphers fall "far short of perfection." To Mr. Patterson's view, a perfect code had four properties: It should be adaptable to all languages; it should be simple to learn and memorize; it should be easy to write and to read; and most important of all, "it should be absolutely inscrutable to all unacquainted with the particular key or secret for decyphering."

Mr. Patterson then included in the letter an example of a message in his cipher, one that would be so difficult to decode that it would "defy the united ingenuity of the whole human race," he wrote. There is no evidence that Jefferson, or anyone else for that matter, ever solved the code. But Jefferson did believe the cipher was so inscrutable that he considered having the State Department use it, and passed it on to the ambassador to France, Robert Livingston.

The cipher finally met its match in Lawren Smithline, a 36-year-old mathematician. Dr. Smithline has a Ph.D. in mathematics and now works professionally with cryptology, or code-breaking, at the Center for Communications Research in Princeton, N.J., a division of the Institute for Defense Analyses.

Full story here.

 

[trysail]

Way cool ! That's a fascinating story, a neat bit of trivia and a nice addition to the lore of cryptography and cryptoanalysis.

Ol' TJ was something— a brilliant and contradictory personality who may have been the last man to have known everything there was to know while he was alive.


____________________________

As an aside:
I have a couple of relatives who are rare/antiquarian book collectors and dealers. Many (many) years ago, I was told by one of them that Thomas Jefferson used a secret mark to identify his books; unfortunately, he didn't tell me what the mark was. I resolved to find the answer. Notwithstanding repeated efforts, I somehow never managed to run it to ground ( hell, even the damn docents at Monticello couldn't answer my question! )— 'til now. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I now have it. Praise be! Finally, I can cross one item off my list of life's mysteries.

"...But private book-lovers need not adopt such
stringent measures. The name and address at the beginning
and the date and price at the end are sufficient
in most cases. Yet it is well to add a secret mark to
identify the volume, in case it strays or is stolen, in which
event the thief will find no great difficulty in removing
the name and address. Of these secret marks, perhaps
the best system is that used by Thomas Jefferson.
He turned to the signature I in his books and put a T
before it, and to the signature T and put a J after it.
He had thus his initials in two places in the book, and
where no one would be likely to look for them."

The Home Library
New York, 1883.
by Brander Matthews and James Brander Matthews

 

[Byron In Exile]

Full story here.

gboubtujd!

vtjohbdpnqvufsjtdifbujohuipvhi.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Back when I was seriously contemplating becoming a history prof, my advisor told me to take my MI background and apply it to the ancient codes and cyphers of the Dutch East India Company. They have whole archives that to this day no one has decoded, mostly because most historians aren't cryptographers. Unfortunately, neither was I.

 

[Handley_Page]

So the Professor is up there with Commander Bazzeries (who broke the ancient French Royal cypher).
clever stuff, innit ?

 

[Guest]

How very cool.

And what a clever joke to a friend, sending his own writings back to him in code. And Jefferson never knew.

What I'd like to know is whether or not there is a map on the back of it.

Jes' curious.

 

[3113]

What I'd like to know is whether or not there is a map on the back of it.

Jes' curious.

And a sketch by Da Vinci.

 

[Guest]

And a sketch by Da Vinci.

Yes.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

And a calendar with July 5th, 2009 circled in red.