A: SONNE           B : SONNE          C: SONNE           D: SONNE

E: SONNE           F : SONNE          G: SONNE           H: SONNE

I: SONNE            K : SONNE         L: SONNE           M: SONNE

N: SONNE           O : SONNE         P: SONNE           Q: SONNE

R: SONNE           S : SONNE          T: SONNE           U: SONNE

W: SONNE          X : SONNE         Y: SONNE           Z: SONNE

With the Bacon cipher the word CRYPTOLOG is encoded as follows: “This is an ordinary Text containing a hidden message!”

The Bacon cipher is one of the earliest binary codes in history, predating the Morse code by over 300 years and the ASCII code by over 400 years. Here’s an English version of Bacon’s book chapter about it.

Elonka found Elizebeth Friedman’s Bacon message in the words KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. Some of the letters spelling out this sentence have serifs, some do not (e.g., look at the capital E’s). If we write each letter that is with serif in italic bold letters, we get the following:

KNOWL EDGEI SPOWE R

This encodes the following three letters: WFF. These are the initials of William Frederick Friedman. A brief message, to be sure, but it is a nice dalliance and very typical for the Friedmans.

You want to watch and listen to Elonka explaining the message she has found? Here she is on a video I made at the grave:



Further reading: Listen to this musical cipher from 1933

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Kommentare (3)

  1. #1 Klaus Schmeh
    26. Oktober 2017

    Richard Santacoloma via Facebook:
    Not really a code… or maybe it is: In the cemetery my in-laws are interred in, there is a stone with a little zeppelin engraved on the back. The rest of the stone was normal. I saw that man was young when he died, so I guessed that the zeppelin meant he was probably a fan of Led Zeppelin, and maybe a musician. I asked my friend, Mark a fine guitarist and pro musician, if he knew the name… he did, and sure enough I was right. So it was a simple code, or whatever you call it, which told a little story about the guy… but discrete enough, I guess, to get by the memorial committee at the cemetery.

  2. #2 voynichbombe
    Berlin
    26. Oktober 2017

    VERY nice story, thank you! But what’s the deal with the superfluous R at the end? Otherwise the compression ratio would be the same as in
    ThE VoyNIch BoMbE
    🙂

  3. #3 Tinquerbell
    Port Hadlock
    9. Oktober 2021

    Is that morse underneath the headstone?