The Philosophical Breakfast Club by Laura J. Snyder

statesmen. Bacon himself was well versed in the art; his brother Anthony, known to be a British spy working in France, often passed letters to Francis, sometimes in cipher, and many believe that Francis too worked as a secret agent at times, sending his own encrypted messages. 10 In his work
De Augmentis
, the Latin translation of a longer version of his
Advancement of Learning
, Bacon wrote on the importance of ciphers, and invented one of his own, in which each letter of the plain text is replaced by some combination of five a’s and b’s. Bacon’s interest in ciphers would later spawn an entire industry of conspiracy theorists convinced that Bacon was the author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare, and that he had “encrypted” those works with his secret story as the illegitimate son and heir of Queen Elizabeth I, only nominally the “Virgin Queen.” 11
    In the late 1830s, public interest in ciphers was revitalized by a new invention: the electric telegraph, which transmitted electric signals overwires, enabling speedy long-distance communication for the first time. In 1837, Babbage’s friend Charles Wheatstone—who, like Babbage, was obsessed with ciphers and codes—joined with another physicist, William Cooke, to invent the first electric telegraph in Great Britain. Their system built upon the discovery of the Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted that electric current in a wire generates a magnetic field that can deflect a compass needle. The Cooke-Wheatstone telegraph used this principle, as well as the later invention of the electromagnet, to send signals through a wire resulting in motions of one or more needles that could be translated into alphabetical symbols, spelling out the message. By the early 1840s the Cooke-Wheatstone telegraph had been installed at numerous stations of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western Railway.
    At around the same time, in the United States, Samuel Morse was developing his own system of electric telegraphy, in which a series of short and long elements, known as dots and dashes, were used as a substitute alphabet; these dots and dashes could be transmitted over wires via electrical impulses. Eventually the Morse telegraph would take over in Europe, even in England, where it displaced the Cooke-Wheatstone model.
    Morse code was not a cipher, in the sense that it did not encrypt a message that was safe from being understood by others. Rather, it was an alternative alphabet, one made up of dots and dashes. To send a message by telegraph required giving it to the telegraph operator, who would read it and translate it into the Morse alphabet. The message’s meaning would be clear to the operator sending it, as well as to the operator on the receiving end, and to anyone who happened to intercept the message who could read Morse code. This was worrisome to people sending secret business communications or very personal information. A newspaper article of the time on telegraphy lamented “the violation of all secrecy” felt by those who sent telegrams, and called for the development of a “simple yet secure cipher” that would enable coded messages to be sent and received, but not understood by the operators. 12 People began to experiment with constructing ciphers that could be used for this purpose. Wheatstone would go on to invent a cipher that became known as “Playfair’s cipher,” because his friend Lyon Playfair lobbied loudly for its adoption by the War Office. 13
    Interest in cryptology extended even to everyday life. Young lovers, forbidden to express their affections publicly, and often even prohibited from meeting, were afraid to send letters that could be interceptedby their parents. Instead, they corresponded by placing encrypted messages in the personal columns of newspapers, called “agony columns.” Babbage, Wheatstone, and Playfair liked to get together and scan the columns, trying to decipher the contents, which were often risqué. One time,