Math Is Fun Forum

Yes, the source of the messages is Alice Clay's "Agony Column of the Times 1800-1870" which is digitized on Google, but I also have a hard copy of the book from a non digitized source.  The google PDF is a good copy but when I searched the text, the digitized OCR version that popped up had odd characters inserted. The only characters I did not type were the periods, as they appear after every letter. I believe the typesetter also placed a space after every period and *, and then 2 spaces where I have indicated one space.  So, I have condensed the message from E. A. * * *   E. B.  to EA*** EB as it really seemed pointless to put a period after each and every letter and a space after each letter with two spaces after (what I presume is) word breaks.

Yes, the ciphers appear over several years.  The first one appears in 1821 and the last in 1824, but they are generally addressed the same way (E.A. is the first "letter" in both a message in 1821 and in 1824).  Two appear in 1821, 4 appear in 1823, and the last two appear in 1824.  However, several of the same letter combinations appear in all the messages, which leads me to believe the code wasn't changed between the years (because of the variety of letter combos one can have with 2-letter combos starting with A, B, C, D, & F).

I still question whether a solution would be online - not because it is difficult (and I'm not saying it isn't!) but because it really has been a book in limited circulation until recently.  Google just released this book onto the interwebs within the past year, and I don't think people are beating down the door to read it.  Before it was available online, it was difficult for me to get ahold of one in hard copy (in 2005 or 2006); although I finally found one via ILL from the other side of the country - and if I recall correctly, there were only about 4 copies in public libraries in the US - the others did not circulate (because of the age and scarcity of the book).

I can guess with 99.9% certainty that the Times had no idea what the method for enciphering was.  I've solved many of the other ciphers in the Clay book (they are practically all simple substitution ciphers ), and a few of them deal with ongoing petty crime, and a few mention death (whether from murder or natural causes is unclear).  At any rate, the Agony Column was the fore-runner of our classifieds, and any one could place any message there - but they did not have to reveal the plaintext to the publisher.  Most individuals disguised their messages to keep it from prying eyes (a lot of messages were for secret lovers), and that undoubtedly included people working at the paper.  Papers like the Times didn't care what the message was, they just published whatever someone wanted to pay to put in the Agony Column.

Today, I ran across a cipher from around this time called the ADFGX cipher (which can actually use any 5 letters), the forerunner of the ADFGVX cipher.  It seems similar in that the first letter is one of five letters, but the rest doesn't match up.  I think it might still be related to this code somehow, and I need to do a little more research.  One side may be ABCDF and the other side might be a word or phrase to create the solution matrix.  Anyway, I learned today that whoever encoded this message in the early 1800s wasn't messing around - this was pretty advanced for the time in which it was published, if it is related to the ADFGX cipher, which only appeared after the telegraph was in use.