TheCodeBreakers
most famous intellectuals of his day. This was Johannes Trithemius, a
Benedictine monk whose dabbling in alchemy and other mystic powers
made him one of the most revered figures in occult science, while his
more solid scholarship won him the title of "Father of Bibiliography." In
1518, a year and a half after his death, his Polygraphiae libri sex, loannis
Trithemii abbatis Peapolitani, quondam Spanheimensis, ad Maximilianum
Caesarem ("Six Books of Polygraphy, by Johannes Trithemius, Abbot at
Wurzburg, formerly at Spanheim, for the Emperor Maximilian") was
published. By far the bulk of the volume consists of the columns of
words printed in large Gothic type that Trithemius used in his systems of
cryptography. But in the work's Book V appears, for the first time, the
square table, or tableau. This is the elemental form of polyalphabetic
substitution, for it exhibits all at once all the cipher alphabets in a
particular system
annaabi.ee 
