trivia

Double-click on any word and see its definition from Cambridge Dictionaries Online.

Person
Charles Wheatstone was a 19th century English physicist, born on February 6th, 1802. As well as devising the Playfair cipher he also invented the Wheatstone bridge, a device for accurately measuring electrical resistance which became widely used in laboratories. He also initiated the usage of electromagnets in electric generators and devised the stereoscope, a device for viewing pictures in three dimensions still used today. Read more

History
The Arabs were the first people to clearly understand the principles of cryptography and to elucidate the beginning of cryptanalysis. They devised and used both substitution and transposition ciphers and discovered the use of letter frequency distributions in cryptanalysis. As a result of this by approximately 1412 al-Kalka-shandi could include in his encyclopaedia Subh al-a’sha a respectable if elementary treatment of several cryptographic systems. He also gave explicit instructions on how to cryptanalyze ciphertext using letter frequency counts including examples illustrating the technique. Read more

Film
Enigma (1983): directed by Jeannot Szwarc and starring Martin Sheen, Brigitte Fossey and Sam Neill. “A thrilling spy story (involving a computer part which scrambles Russian messages), interwoven with a beautiful love story. Source: IMDb

Numbers
17576: the number of possible rotor settings on the original commercial Enigma machine.
2⁵⁵: the average number of steps in the exhaustive search required to “break” Data Encryption Standard (DES), the most well known and widely used symmetric algorithm in the world, commonly used in cryptosystems until 1998, when the US Government discontinued its use due to security concerns. Read more

Thing
Enigma machine: cipher machine with "rotating rotors" invented by Albert Scherbius and used by the Germans in World War II to encrypt military messages. Use an applet which simulates the operation of an Enigma machine. Read more

Place
Bletchley Park: top-secret location where the British (including Dilly Knox and John Jeffreys) worked on the ideas for breaking Enigma that they had gained from the Poles at a meeting in the Pyry forest in Poland in 1939. The Turing bombe (effectively a collection of Enigma machines all working together) was also designed there by two British mathematicians - Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman. Read more

Quotes
My research suggests that men and women may speak different languages that they assume are the same, using similar words to encode disparate experiences of self and social relationships. (Carol Gilligan, US writer, researcher)

Wordplay
The Morse Code is an anagram of Here Come Dots

Literature
Famous Stories of Code and Cipher by Raymond Tostevin Bond, Collier Books, 1965. Contains the following stories: The Puzzle Lock, by R. A. Freeman; The Great Cipher, by M. D. Post; The Ministering Angel, by E. C. Bentley; The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, by M. R. James; QL 696.C9, by A. Boucher; The Gold-bug, by E. A. Poe; The Adventure of the Dancing Men, by A. C. Doyle; The Key in Michael, by E. Barker; Calloway's Code, by O. Henry; The Four Suspects, by A. Christie; The Secret of the Singular Cipher, by F. A. M. Webster; Code no. 2, by E. Wallace; The Blackmailers, by H. O'Higgins; The White Elephant, by M. Allingham; Uncle Hyacinth, by A. Noyes; The Stolen Christmas Box, by L. de la Torre.

Date
1470: Leone Battista Alberti's Trattati in cifra was published in Rome. Alberti dealt "especially with theories and processes of cipherment, methods of decipherment, and statistical data" Read more