Word: cipher
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...letters to Cicero, Julius Caesar employed a cipher in which each character was replaced by one standing three places down the alphabet-thus D stood for a, E for b, F for c, etc. Mary Queen of Scots wrote conspiratory messages in cipher; when intercepted and interpreted by England's first great cryptanalyst, Thomas Phelippes, they helped bring Mary to the chopping block. In the U.S., Benedict Arnold employed several codes, including one that was keyed to Volume I of the fifth Oxford edition of Blackstone's Commentaries...
...consequence who has ever used codes-or seriously thought about them. As he guides the reader through the difficulties of steganography (invisible ink, microdots), monalphabetics (simple, one-alphabet systems, such as the one described in the box, next page), and polyalphabetics (many alphabets used in the same cipher message), Kahn keeps his subject lively and even dramatic. He describes, for example, how cryptology helped get the U.S. into one world war- and helped shorten another...
...World War II, almost everyone knows that the U.S. broke Japan's highest level "Purple Code" before Pearl Harbor. But precious few realize what the breakthrough entailed. The code was based on a rotor system-mazes of wires connecting two or more alphabetic rotors that change ciphers at every punch of a keyboard. The use of two rotors permits 676 different cipher positions; five rotors provide 11,881,376 codes...
...appears five times in the cryptogram. It happens that the most frequent English vowel diagraph is ea. Thus it is a good bet that U = a. Similarly, since the combination io is most frequent among the three dissident vowels in English, assume that it is represented in the cipher by OA. Therefore...
...letters in the cipher have been tentatively identified. The solution (in the first six cipher groups) would look like this...