Mathematician Charles Babbage is known to have deciphered private messages that appeared in agony columns of newspapers. In Babbage's papers (Add. MS 37205), Franksen (1984) counted about fifteen enciphered ads (p.47), among which he identifies various schemes.
The present article describes 12 ciphers of newspaper clippings in Babbage's papers. Most, but not all, are from agony columns.
21 January 1854 (Add MS 37205 f.77) (Franksen p.49)
20 June 1861 (Add MS 37205 f.222) (Franksen p.50)
(Here and in the following, I'm not sure whether the identifier is in cipher. Babbage considered so, because he writes "Edums" in his decryption.)
[same date as above?] (Add MS 37205 f.223) (Franksen p.51)
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Key: Plain: ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Cipher: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ |
14 November 1845 (Add MS 37205 f.42) (Franksen p.52)
(Add MS 37205 f.224) (Franksen p.53)
Babbage writes "esb" "tbx" "zpv" "ufo" besides the clipping. He knew these three-letter words would give a clue. (As it turned out, false word division is used at the beginning and "esb" is not a standalone word.)
On the margin, the letters of the alphabet are written vertically, in which some letters are given their reading: a=b, d=e, e=f, l=m, n=o, r=s, x=y. These must have been enough for Babbage to see the cipher is merely shifting one place in the alphabet.
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Key: Plain: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz Cipher:bcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyza |
13 May 1859 (Add MS 37205 f.221) (Franksen p.56)
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Key: Plain: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz Cipher:defghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabc |
31 July 1854 (Add MS 37205 f.?) (Franksen p.57)
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Key: Plain: abcdefghijklm nopqrstuvwxyz Cipher:mlkjihgfedcba zyxwvutsrqpon |
Some years ago, I happened to acquire copies of some related images when I studied Babbage's work on Queen Henrietta-Maria's cipher letter (see another article). They include further specimens.
"Amjyrdkowasejow Deabxpeop" appears to be the name of the commander, possibly in cipher. This cryptogram (so it seems) remains unsolved and may not be found in resources dealing with agony columns.
Babbage writes: "Cipher??", "Times Tuesday 13 Jan 1863", "Tried this with the stetts[???] June[?] 1864".
Obviously, this is not the result of the route transposition cipher mainly used by the Federal Army during the Civil War, because the latter relies on transposition of words, not letters (see another article).
To consider its non-cryptographic aspects, the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable was not yet stable and news from America had to be carried by steamers combined with land telegraphy (Steven Roberts (2011), "Bridging the Gap - News Telegraphs 1863-1870"), but "telegraphic news from America" is occasionally mentioned in contemporary newspapers (The British Newspaper Archive; on this site, it seems the date (in the search result list viewable to non-subscribers) refers to the volume or something rather than the date for a specific article). So, it is not clear how old this news was. (Googling finds that the article appeared in Australia three month later: Adelaide South Australian Weekly Chronicle, 11 April 1863 (NewspaperArchive). Considering there were many brigades, identification of one brigade commander from historical materials may not be easy.
This is one of 23 messages with the identifier FIDES described in Jean Palmer (pseudonym of Tony Gaffney) (2005), The Agony Column Codes & Ciphers. Gaffney (under another pseudonym) found as early as 2008 (Wayback Machine) that the FIDES cryptogram employs a book code using Johnson's Pocket Dictionary of the English Language (1862) (the 1883 edition at Google). He searched the British Library for the dictionary based on his guesses from frequency and cleartext and the forty-ninth turned out to match.
As it turned out, the mapping of the pair of figures to the page and the word position is not straightforward. The first figure indicates the page number plus one. The second figure indicates the word position counted from the bottom of the right column. Some non-paired numbers are given their own meanings: 1=I, 2=YOU, 20=punctuation.
(See Elonka Dunin and Klaus Schmeh (2020), Codebreaking, A Practical Guide p.336-337; Cipherbrain (2014.11.15).)
This is one from a series of ads by detective Ignatius Paul Pollaky. It is discussed in Cipherbrain (2014.12.17).
Thomas Ernst found this is actually two-digit codes regrouped. It can be solved as:
(This mapping may not be final. From machine translation of the discussion in Cipherbrain, it seems there is some inconsistency with another message.)
This is J.F.W. Herschel's cipher challenge. See my blog post.
The actual newspaper article is not clipped. Babbage only transcribes the ciphertext and analyzes it.
This probably employs simple monoalphabetic substitution and online substitution cipher solver such as this instantly provides possible solutions, but I haven't reached a convincing one. The length of the ciphertext is 30, barely longer than the unicity distance 28 for a simple substitution cipher in English (Wikipedia). But as long as the word division is correct, solution would be much easier.
It appears Babbage, then 78 years old, could not solve this.
Franksen, Ole Immanuel (1984), Mr. Babbage's Secret (Internet Archive)