TheCodeBreakers
it would have been electromechan-ically enciphered.
The wire interconnections comprised the germ of the rotor—a means
to vary the monoalphabetic encipherment. In 1917, Hebern reduced his
ideas to the first drawings made of a rotor system, which, a year later,
grew into actual apparatus.
Early in 1921, he advertised an "unbreakable" cipher in a marine
magazine, but Miss Agnes Meyer, a crypt-analyst in the Navy's Code and
Signal Section, solved the sample message. When Commander Milo F.
Draemel, the officer in charge, sent Hebern the solution, he came at once
to Washington and showed the Navy his machine, filing his first rotor
patent while he was there. The Navy had been looking, a director of naval
communications later recalled, for "something radically better [in secret
communications]. Something automatic came into our minds, and it had
been in the back of our heads for some time. Along came Mr. Hebern
from the West Coast with the Hebern machine. He made one, as I recall,
annaabi.ee 
