The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

by Simon Singh

“Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.”

This is just Europeans today

Babbage was irritated by the lines “Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born,” which are the last lines of the plaintext above. Consequently, he offered a correction to Tennyson’s “otherwise beautiful” poem: It must be manifest that if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill … I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem you have it read—“Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 is born.” … The actual figure is so long I cannot get it onto a line, but I believe the figure 1 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry. I am, Sir, yours, etc., Charles Babbage.

This resulted in lovers sending encrypted messages to each other via the personal columns of newspapers. These “agony columns,” as they became known, provoked the curiosity of cryptanalysts, who would scan the notes and try to decipher their titillating contents.

At the time of America’s entry into the Second World War, the Navajo were living in harsh conditions and being treated as inferior people. Yet their tribal council supported the war effort and declared their loyalty: “There exists no purer concentration of Americanism than among the First Americans.”