Charles Dellschau (1830-1923), a US outsider artist, left behind fascinating paintings and numerous ciphertexts. Can my readers help me to decrypt these?

In the 1960s a used-furniture dealer, Fred Washington, purchased a number of old books from a trash collector in Houston, Texas. He took them to his warehouse, where they ended up under a pile of discarded carpet.

Only years later a local art collector became aware of the books. They were filled with strange paintings created by a certain Charles Dellschau (1830-1923), a Germany-born butcher who lived in Texas. Dellschau was completely unknown in the art community.

Dellschau

Source: Wikimedia

After the discovery of his paintings, Dellschau became posthumously known as an outsider artist. The paintings sold by the trash collector are the only Dellschau works known to exist.

What makes the Dellschau artworks interesting for this blog is that they contain numerous passages encrypted in a simple substitution cipher. Here’s an example:

Dellschau-Painting-Cryptogram1

Source: PD

I have written about Dellschau before. His books are listed on my encrypted books page (#00084).

 

Dellschau’s paintings

The paintings in Dellschau’s books were created between 1899 and his death in 1923. Here’s a typical Dellschau picture:

Dellschau-Painting-5

Source: PD

Many of Dellschau’s paintings show flight machines, such as balloons, dirigibles, or flying carriages, sometimes including pilots and passengers.

Dellschau-Painting-2

Source: PD

From today’s view, these air vehicles don’t look very realistic.

According to the hand-written texts in his books, Dellschau was a member of a secret society named NYMZA, which developed advanced aeronautic techniques as early as in the mid 19th century. Supposedly, Dellschau’s manuscripts were meant to document these activities.

Of course, NYMZA and their spectacular flight machines never existed. Dellschau’s books can therefore be regarded as illustrated Science Fiction literature, created in a time when aviation was considered a major future technology.

 

Dellschau’s cryptograms

The book The Secrets of Dellschau by Dennis Crenshaw and Pete Navarro is the leading source for Dellschau and his art. Navarro, who spent decades studying Dellschau’s life and oeuvre, and he broke the cipher the artist used for the encrypted passages contained in his books. For instance, the following encrypted word appears particularly often in Dellschau’s paintings:

Dellschau-NYMZA

Source: PD

It stands for NYMZA, the name of the sad aviation organisation.

To my regret, I am not aware of a good description of Dellschau’s cipher. The aforementioned book only touches this topic very briefly. According to a website that is not active any more, but can be retrieved in the Internet Archive, the substitution table looks as follows:

Source: PD

Using this key, I tried to decrypt the following ciphertext (the upper left part is marked orange):

Source: PD

This is what came out for the marked part:

NOW IF TO SEANTFAN MARTA CLAYM TO BE THE OMT:ENAT

Though this plaintext contains meaningful words, it doesn’t really make sense. I also tried my luck on the following passage:

Source: PD

With a few tweaks, this decrypts to a German sentence (“You need to know how to help yourself”):

MAN MUS
SICH  ZU
HELFEN WISSN

Altogether, the key table provided above appears to work not very well. This might be because Dellschau used it sloppily – perhaps he thought of his ciphertexts as art, not as something that carries information. It’s also possible that the table contains a few mistakes, though the main letters seem to be correct.

Can a reader help me to correctly decrypt the ciphertexts introduced above? Is the substitution table correct? I’m looking forward to helpful comments.


Further reading: An extraordinary encrypted book: George Orwell’s “1984” enciphered in color

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Kommentare (15)

  1. #1 Richard SantaColoma
    https://proto57.wordpress.com
    18. September 2020

    These illustrations are wonderful! They remind me of some much later parodies of scientific works, such as those seen in National Lampoon in the 1970’s, and independent works like the Codex Seraphinianus.

    Of course I also believe that the Voynich Manuscript may be a very similar type work, meant to look as though it is a genuine herbal or scientific treatise, but the images only being evocative of anything real. I also think it dates to roughly the same time frame of the above, and of course, both are in cipher.

    I’d like to add mention of this to my 2009 blog post, “Prop, Hoax, Tribute or Art?”:

    https://proto57.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/prop-hoax-tribute-art/

  2. #2 Richard SantaColoma
    https://proto57.wordpress.com
    18. September 2020

    And although fantasy craft, I think that the concept is also a very modern one… if I read those illustrations correctly: They appear to be intended as hybrid lighter and heavier type aircraft, with an “assist” of light gases housed in the fuselage. This is actually a feasible concept, being experimented with today by several groups.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Air_Vehicles_HAV_304/Airlander_10#/media/File:Airlander_-_US_Army_Flight_Front.jpg

  3. #3 Richard SantaColoma
    https://proto57.wordpress.com
    18. September 2020

    As for the translations so far provided by Pete Navarro, such as the supposed “NYMZA”, might be taken “with a grain of salt”, as he is a “UFO writer”. The translations may be as fanciful as the original text, that is…

    … which is good news, as it leaves open the better possible that this could be solved if one started from scratch.

    Some “red flags” of incorrect translations is to me the claim that the proposer of them “sees” some vein of meaning as being “cleverly” hidden, although “unconnected”, and “multiple codes”, and so on… which often points to highly speculative, and results not repeatable by others: ” According to Navarro, the story of the Sonora Aero Club and their achievements had been cleverly hidden by Dellschau in his drawings using several codes and unconnected sentences hidden throughout the work.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dellschau

  4. #4 Gerry
    18. September 2020

    In line 1 it reads ORT (not OMT), but this makes no sense, too. Maybe SEANTFAN is a name, as there is a Sean T Fan in Oakland’s phonebook – a grandson?

    But line 4 (the last line) is readable: HERE IT IS … HELP IT IF YOU CAN …

  5. #5 Norbert
    18. September 2020

    I think the mystery of “OMT:ENAT” can be solved:
    The second letter is clearly an R and not an M, and the third one can be interpreted very well as I instead of T. If you then assume that the colon is a homophone for G (indicated by a single dot in the key), and consider that an O follows, “ORIGENATOR” could be meant, a common misspelling for ORIGINATOR.

  6. #6 Norbert
    18. September 2020

    Given the similarity between T and I (of which HERE IT IS in the last line gives a good example), “MARTA” could also be “MARIA”.

  7. #7 Matthew Brown
    18. September 2020

    It seems the key is correct but the handwritten symbols vary a bit from those in the key image, several symbols are very similar and possible mistakes in the cipher make it a little tricky. Here’s my work in progress so far;

    NOW IF IOSE AN IUAN MARIA CLAYM TO BE THE ORIGENAIS S THE HAD THE DUST AND AUGUST SCHOETTLER GOT A?LE
    FOR ?IREN THEM FOR THE GRISERS…?O THIS PAY …I MYSELF PUT THE ABOUE…MIOUP AND THE WINS I PUT ON
    BECAUSE I WANTE TT F SEE HPW THE WOULD LOOCK ON PAPER AND SECON…WATH OTHERS WOULD SAY ABOUT IT…
    …HERE IT IS… HELP IT IF YOU CAN…

    [Left column]
    O YES WE DID DEN KNW NOTHIN SAY

    [Right column]
    NOW TALK ABOUT YOUR DIRIGIBELS

  8. #8 Matthew Brown
    19. September 2020

    I haven’t been able to make much of an improvement;

    NOW IF JOSE AN(D) JUAN MARIA CLAYM TO BE THE ORIGENATO(R )S SI HE HAD THE D[I]STANC(E) AUGUST SCHOETTLER GOT A PLE
    FOR FIREN THEM FOR THE GRISERS…SO THIS [W]AY …I MYSELF PUT THE ABOVE…MIO UP AND THE WIN(G)S I PUT ON
    BECAUSE I WANTE(D) TOO U SEE H[O]W THE(Y) WOULD LOOCK ON PAPER AND SECON(D)…WATH OTHERS WOULD SAY ABOUT IT…
    …HERE IT IS… HELP IT IF YOU CAN…

    The phrase MIO appears in the diagram above the ciphertext so while it looks wrong I think that part is decrypted correctly.

    The cipher symbol o has 2 meanings, it either repeats the previous letter or represents the digraph OO. I wonder if some of the other symbols have a second meaning which might explain why most of the message decrypts fine but some sections get garbled.

  9. #9 Klaus Schmeh
    19. September 2020

    @Matthew, Richard, Gerry, Norbert: Thank you very much!
    It seems that Dellschau used his cipher quite sloppily, which makes his messages hard to decrypt.

  10. #10 Thomas
    19. September 2020

    @Matthew Brown

    The phrase MIO is correct since this was the name of an aircraft depicted by Dellschau (AERO MIO): https://uh.edu/engines/aeromio.jpg

  11. #11 Klaus Schmeh
    19. September 2020

    > I wonder if some of the other symbols have a second
    > meaning which might explain why most of the
    > message decrypts fine but some sections get garbled.
    Interesting question. This means that additional research is necessary.

  12. #12 Ralf Buelow
    20. September 2020

    Here is a nice article about him: https://web.archive.org/web/20131114100850/http://observatory.designobserver.com/feature/dreams-of-the-sonora-aero-club/37754/ Note that he was born in Germany. A modern colleague of Dellschau would be Karl Hans Janke: https://www.arthistoricum.net/en/subjects/image/janke-archive/

  13. #13 Klaus Schmeh
    20. September 2020

    >A modern colleague of Dellschau
    >would be Karl Hans Janke
    Great pictures. Too bad, they don’t contain encrypted messages 😉 Otherwise, they would be very interesting for crypto enthusiasts.

  14. #14 Thomas
    20. September 2020
  15. #15 Klaus Schmeh
    20. September 2020

    @Thomas: Thanks, this is a better reference than the article in the Internet Archive I linked.