Wheatstone deciphered a message from a young man, studying at Oxford, begging his young lover to run off with him to Gretna Green, the village just over the border of Scotland famous for hosting the “runaway marriages” of parties under twenty-one years old without parental consent (which was required in England). Wheatstone playfully placed his own message in the next day’s column, written in the same cipher, counseling the couple against taking this rash and irrevocable step. The next edition of the paper contained a message from the young lady, this time unencrypted: “Dear Charlie, write no more. Our cipher is discovered!” 14 The three men had a good chuckle, and Babbage saved the clippings for his growing collection of newspaper ciphers.
Babbage’s interest in codes and ciphers was born during his schoolboy days; it appealed to his desire to get to the essence and hidden meanings of things, demonstrated even in his infanthood when he would break his toys to find out what was inside. When he was at school, Babbage’s skill at decoding would often get him into trouble: “The bigger boys made ciphers, but if I got hold of a few words, I usually found out the key,” he boasted. “The consequence of this ingenuity was occasionally painful: the owners of the detected ciphers sometimes thrashed me, though the fault lay in their own stupidity.” 15 Black eyes and bruised knuckles notwithstanding, Babbage gained the lifelong belief that “deciphering is, in my opinion, one of the most fascinating of arts.”
Like Babbage, Herschel was a schoolboy enamored of decoding. Herschel’s first known letter was sent to his mother from his school when he was seven years old requesting that she send his music and his “ciphering books.” 16 Whewell was also drawn to codes and ciphers as a young man. His youthful courtship of a girl was abetted by a cipher; upon the young woman’s request, Whewell wrote a bit of doggerel in an elementary cipher, replacing the word “cipher/sigh for” with the symbol “Ø”:
U Ø a Ø, but I Ø U;
O Ø no Ø but O Ø me;
O let not my Ø a Ø go
,
But give Ø a Ø I Ø U so
.
(You sigh for a cipher, but I sigh for you; O sigh for no cipher but O sigh for me; O let not my sigh for a cipher go, But give sigh for a sigh, for I sigh for you so.) 17 It is not known whether or not the cipher had the intended effect on the young lady.
It is little wonder that the members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club were all intrigued by ciphers. Deciphering is like scientific discovery—confronting an initially impenetrable wall, the cryptanalyst, like the scientist, must slowly chip away until the secrets that lie beneath are revealed. Both Whewell and Herschel explicitly drew this connection in their writings on scientific method, describing scientific discovery as a kind of decoding of nature. Whewell used this metaphor when he argued for the importance of predictive success, noting that such success is evidence that we have cracked nature’s code. And he came to hold that the world of facts is like an alphabet used to encrypt a secret message; when natural philosophers “had deciphered there a comprehensive and substantial truth, they could not believe that the letters had been thrown together by chance.” 18 In an article written for the fledgling journal
Photographic News
, Herschel similarly proposed that finding a method for creating color photographs (which he had very nearly managed to do himself) was akin to breaking a seemingly impenetrable cipher; Herschel appended to the article a text written in a cipher of his own, leaving it for the readers to try to decode the message. 19 He had previously tried to stump Babbage, sending him a letter written entirely in cipher (except for “Dear Babbage”). Babbage broke the cipher handily, leading Herschel to exclaim, “You are a
real wonder.…
I shall never try to trick you again!” 20
B ABBAGE HAD RETURNED to his childhood interest
Babbage’s interest in codes and ciphers was born during his schoolboy days; it appealed to his desire to get to the essence and hidden meanings of things, demonstrated even in his infanthood when he would break his toys to find out what was inside. When he was at school, Babbage’s skill at decoding would often get him into trouble: “The bigger boys made ciphers, but if I got hold of a few words, I usually found out the key,” he boasted. “The consequence of this ingenuity was occasionally painful: the owners of the detected ciphers sometimes thrashed me, though the fault lay in their own stupidity.” 15 Black eyes and bruised knuckles notwithstanding, Babbage gained the lifelong belief that “deciphering is, in my opinion, one of the most fascinating of arts.”
Like Babbage, Herschel was a schoolboy enamored of decoding. Herschel’s first known letter was sent to his mother from his school when he was seven years old requesting that she send his music and his “ciphering books.” 16 Whewell was also drawn to codes and ciphers as a young man. His youthful courtship of a girl was abetted by a cipher; upon the young woman’s request, Whewell wrote a bit of doggerel in an elementary cipher, replacing the word “cipher/sigh for” with the symbol “Ø”:
U Ø a Ø, but I Ø U;
O Ø no Ø but O Ø me;
O let not my Ø a Ø go
,
But give Ø a Ø I Ø U so
.
(You sigh for a cipher, but I sigh for you; O sigh for no cipher but O sigh for me; O let not my sigh for a cipher go, But give sigh for a sigh, for I sigh for you so.) 17 It is not known whether or not the cipher had the intended effect on the young lady.
It is little wonder that the members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club were all intrigued by ciphers. Deciphering is like scientific discovery—confronting an initially impenetrable wall, the cryptanalyst, like the scientist, must slowly chip away until the secrets that lie beneath are revealed. Both Whewell and Herschel explicitly drew this connection in their writings on scientific method, describing scientific discovery as a kind of decoding of nature. Whewell used this metaphor when he argued for the importance of predictive success, noting that such success is evidence that we have cracked nature’s code. And he came to hold that the world of facts is like an alphabet used to encrypt a secret message; when natural philosophers “had deciphered there a comprehensive and substantial truth, they could not believe that the letters had been thrown together by chance.” 18 In an article written for the fledgling journal
Photographic News
, Herschel similarly proposed that finding a method for creating color photographs (which he had very nearly managed to do himself) was akin to breaking a seemingly impenetrable cipher; Herschel appended to the article a text written in a cipher of his own, leaving it for the readers to try to decode the message. 19 He had previously tried to stump Babbage, sending him a letter written entirely in cipher (except for “Dear Babbage”). Babbage broke the cipher handily, leading Herschel to exclaim, “You are a
real wonder.…
I shall never try to trick you again!” 20
B ABBAGE HAD RETURNED to his childhood interest
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