Unsolved: The encrypted telegram of a US politician to the Rothschild bank
In 1879, the U.S. Vice Secretary of the Treasury sent an encrypted telegram to the Rothschild Bank in London. Can any reader decipher it?
During my wanderings through the internet I came across another interesting document. Using the search term “Coded Message” on Google, I landed on eBay, where an encrypted telegram was offered for sale.
The Rothschild Telegram
Here is a scan of the telegram:
Quelle/Source: eBay
Another scan pictured on eBay shows the same message mirrored (the reverse side?). I have mirrored the image:
Quelle/Source: eBay
The telegram was apparently sent in 1879. The sender was the then Deputy U.S. Secretary of the Treasury John B. Hawley.
Quelle/Source: Wikimedia Commons
The letter (I call it the “Rothschild Telegram”) was addressed to a Mr. Conant at the Rothschild Bank in London. While the bank still exists today, unfortunately I could not find out anything about an employee named Conant.
The lower part of the telegram is written in plain text. It probably deals with securities transactions.
The encryption
The upper part of the telegram is encrypted. Here is my transcription (without guarantee):
after marble tilt yarrow
the order oasis faith
fred flag crayon and
cling therefore parch +
insect ahead here
To all appearances, the telegram was encoded with a codebook. This was a common method at the time in question. A codebook contains a code word for each common word of a language and is therefore to be used similar to a dictionary. The following example shows a page from a codebook:
Quelle/Source: Internet Archive
The code word can be a sequence of letters (for example “egoac”, as shown on the illustrated page), but also sequences of numbers (for example 27384) and meaningful words were used.
The Rothschild telegram was apparently encoded with a codebook using meaningful words (“oasis”, crayon”, “insect”, …) as code words. It is clear that the actual meaning of these terms does not matter, but that they stand for words with a completely different meaning. The (still unsolved) silk dress cryptogram is also encoded with such a codebook:
Quelle/Source: Sara Rivers
A codebook-encrypted telegram can usually only be cracked by finding the codebook. This has been done many times, as you can read in my current book “Codebreaking: A Practical Guide” (written with Elonka Dunin). This work also describes the two best sources that list codebooks. One is Satoshi Tomokyo’s website, and the other is John McVey’s. It is quite possible that the codebook used for the Rothschild Telegram can also be found there.
Does a reader manage to find the codebook used and decode the telegram? I will gladly accept hints.
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Further reading: An encrypted telegram about the sales of the Danish West-Indies
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