TheCodeBreakers
I beg you not
to think 1 wrote under any irritation. I fear my letters being read by others.
. . . Wheatstone and fellow scientist Charles Babbage often solved these
simple missives. Babbage easily read a Caesar substitution of May 13,
1859, addressed to Robert: Why do you not come or write for me? Such
grief and anxiety!—Oh! Love Love! His most difficult was a numerical
cryptogram of December 21, 1853, addressed to Flo and beginning 1821
82734 29 30 84541. After, apparently, months of trying it as a
polyalphabetic and as a homophonic substitution, he finally discovered
that it was a polyphonic substitution, in which each cipher number
stood for from one to four plaintext letters. It began (with two enciphering
errors): Thou image of my heart!
Sometimes people inserted cryptograms just to see if anyone would
make them out. A piece of advice about education, enciphered in a
annaabi.ee 
