tangential Wheatstone reference

[JimLucas]

While waiting for other operations to finish, I'm (re)reading in bits and snatches the book Mr. Babbage's Secret (1984), by Ole Franksen. (He's Danish, but the book is in English.) It's the story of Charles Babbage's interest and involvement in cryptography. But on p. 38, I came across the following:

With the pattern of these ciphers well established it is easy to understand that Babbage felt no urge to accept the challenge of solving one of Charles I's ciphers (...). The physicist Charles Wheatstone was therefore approached and, accepting, he succeeded.

Franksen then quotes from W.T. Jeans' Life of the Electricians (1887):

A marvellous instance of his skill in deciphering cryptographic documents occurred in 1858. Sir Henry Ellis relates that a good many years previously the trustees of the British Museum purchased at a high price what appeared to be a very important document in cipher, occupying seven folio pages closely filled with numerals. The top of every page bore the signature of King Charles the First, and was countersigned by Digbye. For a long time Sir Henry Ellis endeavoured to get it deciphered for the purpose of including it in his series of letters illustrative of the history of England, but he could not get anyone able to read it. One evening at Earl Stanhope's he accidently mentioned that fact to Lord Wrottesley, who suggested that Professor Wheatstone's ingenuity might be able to unravel the secret writing, and accordingly Sir Henry Ellis at once sent it to the Professor, requesting that he would investigate its contents. This took place on June 1st, 1858. In the document in question about ninety different numerals were employed to represent the letters of the alphabet, and besides the complexity of each letter being represented by several distinct numerals, there was no division between the different words, and the numbers represented not English (as was first supposed) but French words. This document, which had baffled all other experts, was interpreted by Professor Wheatstsone. A copy of it having been sent two or three years afterwards to the Philobiblion Society, along with the key to the cipher, the Society expressed "their admiration of this additional instance of that wonderful faculty of interpretation which seems to ordinary minds a special intuition not unworthy of a great scientific discoverer and practical benefactor of the age".

Then Franksen says,

Somewhat disappointingly the letter turned out to be a marriage contract. The solution together with Wheatstone's explanation of the key was published in 1862 in the Memoirs of the Philobiblion Society.

[Stephen Chambers]

Jim,

 

On another occasion his interest in cryptology famously foiled an elopement. It seems that he and his great friend Lyon Playfair amused themselves by solving the enciphered personal messages in The Times. They easily read the correspondence of an Oxford student with his young lady in London, and when the student proposed an elopement, Wheatstone inserted an advertisement in the same cipher remonstrating with her. There followed a frantic "Dear Charlie: Write no more. Our cipher is discovered!"—and then silence.

 

Wheatstone also invented what became known as the Playfair Cipher (after his friend published it, and credited to Wheatstone) that was used by the British during the Boer War and World War I, and by the Germans in World War II.

[Anglo-Irishman]

a ... practical benefactor of the age".

 

THAT was the reference to Wh eatstone, right?

 

 

Cheers,

John