It was among the 50 most difficult codes to solve in the world. A researcher from Canada discovered what was actually written on pieces of paper hidden in a secret pocket of a 19th-century silk dress.
The story, which began with an accidental purchase in 2013, was described by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the government institution responsible for weather forecasts. She has been featured in the American media in recent days.
Sara Rivers Cofield spotted a silk dress in an antique store in Maine more than 10 years ago. “She liked the metal buttons and the sophisticated cuff”, i.e. the folds that emphasize feminine shapes, so she decided to buy it. Already in the house she found a secret pocket hidden between the folds. Inside there are crumpled pieces of paper and mysterious-looking notes.
Notes with a mysterious code in a hidden pocket of the dress
The new owner determined that both the dress and the fragments of paper come from the 1880s. What she couldn’t determine was the meaning of the notes on the paper. These are seemingly random words, like: “Bismark, omit, leafage, dollar, bank (orig. Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank)”.
“There are also numbers between the lines, each line is marked with a different color, and there are strange notes in the margin that remind you of the time,” Cofield wrote on her blog, also suggesting that there may be some kind of code involved.
Shortly after the discovery hit popular sites on the Internet, theories about the cryptogram began to appear. Codes used by lovers, gamblers, and spies were suggested. However, the best lead turned out to be the telegraph. This invention changed the way information was transmitted remotely, but it also required great conciseness. The messages had to be tapped out by a telegraph operator in one city and listened to in another. “Since telegraph companies began charging for the number of words in a telegram, codes that compress messages to reduce the word count have become popular,” NOAA quotes Wayne Chan of the University of Manitoba. Additionally, the codes also allowed the messages to be kept private – they passed through many hands before reaching the recipient.
“A cryptogram from a silk dress.” How the code was cracked
The specialist decided to work on the “silk dress cryptogram”, which was recognized by experts and amateurs as one of the 50 most difficult to solve codes in the world. “After a fruitless search in approximately 170 telegraph code books (…), Chan came across an old book (…) that contained a chapter on the weather code used by the United States Army Signal Corps,” we read on the NOAA website. And the examples shown there seemed to look similar to those on the dress cards. The researcher, using the resources of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, concluded that the messages came from Signal Service weather stations in USA and Canada. Each line recorded described weather observations at a given location and time of day, which were telegraphed to the central Signal Service office in Washington. Thus, each message began with the location of a station whose name was not coded, then appeared coded words specifying – in combination with numbers – temperature, pressure, dew point, precipitation, wind direction, observations of clouds and wind speed, or sunsets. . Thus, “Bismark” in the records meant Bismarck Station in today’s North Dakota, “omit” described air temperature and pressure, “leafage” dew point, “buck” a cloudless sky and lack of precipitation as well as wind direction, and “bank” wind speed and west. sun – as we read on the NOAA website.
So the mystery was solved. Moreover, it was determined that the observations came from May 27, 1888. However, it is not known who the dress belonged to and why the weather reports ended up in a secret pocket. Rivers Cofield, quoted by NOAA, notes that the dress – although it may seem beautiful and fancy to us – is not a ball gown. It more closely resembles the casual business attire of the time and, according to her, could have been worn to work. In the 1880s, a number of women worked as clerical workers in the Army Signal Service in Washington, D.C., so perhaps she was one of them.
Main photo source: X (Twitter) /@NWSBismarck, NOAA