On the other hand, next time I’m accused of turgid writing, I’ll claim it’s mid-nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint code.

Matt Grow advised on the Kanes’ 1858 experiences, and the staff at LDS Archives were kind enough to let me have images of the snippets of letters they don’t normally allow to be copied, because transcriptions really wouldn’t do the job in some cases.

I’ve been putting off reading this series until after I finished all of my papers for the semester. It was well worth the wait and anticipation. This was very cool stuff. Thanks.

This is positively fascinating. How many days / weeks / months / years of research does this represent?

I affirm the suggested publication, for what it’s worth!

The cipher, one might note, was already very old by the 19th century, having been formulated at least as early as 1467 by Renaissance man Leon Battista Alberti.

Don’t be! Comment early and often (Chicago political news must be on my mind for some reason).

The Navajo code talkers went even farther than using Navajo to communicate — they created a code-within-a-code whereby a “turtle” was a specific kind of watercraft and a “hawk” was a specific kind of aircraft, or whatever. Even if somehow the Japanese had had a Navajo on their staff, he couldn’t have known the code within the language. What a terrific skill!

XiGauss, I’m guessing from your handle and your seemingly intimate knowledge of these sources that you use mathematics in real life. You’re adding a lot to this conversation. It’s good to have you here.

I’ll be away from the computer much of the afternoon and evening. A lot of comments have been getting trapped in the filter for some reason. If something doesn’t show up when it should, please accept my apologies and know that I’ll free the comments as soon as I can. I appreciate all the interest in this topic and the encouragement to prep it for publication.

However, a more interesting use of foreign languages relates to BYU basketball days when Danny Ainge and Timo Saaralinen both played. Timo was a native of Finland, and I believe one or two other players or coaches had been on missions to Finland, so the team used to call out inbounds plays in Finnish, which pretty much made it indecipherable by the opposing scholar/athletes.

Things like that don’t always work, especially in Utah. There is the true story of two Finnish tourists who got pulled over in Sandy after an illegal u-turn, and feigned not knowing English by speaking only in Finnish. The cop who pulled them over happened to have served in Finland, and replied in fluent Finnish that their turn was illegal in any language.

I also recall hearing that when the Mexico City temple was opened, the films were delivered in person, but had considerable footage of a boring organ recital put on the front end, so if anyone lost/stole the films, they would likely give up viewing after a few minutes, and not get to the good stuff.

I don’t have Kahn’s book in front of me right now, but Singh’s chapter on the Vigenère cipher (of which Larrabee’s seems to be an example) states that Charles Babbage probably broke the cipher in 1854 but didn’t publish his findings, and that Friedrich Wilhelm Kasiski independently published a solution in 1863. However, Kasiski’s work (in German) does not seem to have been widely known, and as late as 1917, Scientific American still characterized this cipher as “impossible of translation” (Supplement LXXXIII, 1/27/1917, page 61, according to Trappe and Washington). Thus, these solutions don’t seem to have spread as quickly as the cipher did.

Of course, some of those who knew the solution would have had obvious motives to keep it secret, if they were using it to read others’ mail. Tracking the history of cryptography can be difficult, since there are so many secrets involved.