The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

His insight was that all letters of the alphabet can be represented with only two letters, if the two letters are combined in different permutations of five-letter blocks. The letters i and j, and u and v, were interchangeable in Bacon’s time, so, choosing a and b for the two letters that represent all the rest, the new alphabet looks like this: A B C D E F aaaaa aaaab aaaba aaabb aabaa aabab G H I, J K L M aabba aabbb abaaa abaab ababa ababb N O P Q R S abbaa abbab abbba abbbb baaaa baaab T U, V W X Y Z baaba baabb babaa babab babba babbb Each letter becomes five, so a word like Riverbank, written in this cipher, grows five times as long: baaaa abaaa baabb aabaa baaaa aaaab aaaaa abbaa abaab. This is exactly like binary code, the language at the root of computers, and Morse code as well. In all of these systems, just two symbols, arranged in different combinations, can stand for many others. Binary code uses 0s and 1s, Morse code dots and dashes. Francis Bacon discovered the basic principle in 1623.