Modern Mysteries

Mystery secret code found in Victorian dress has finally been cracked

By T.K. Randall
December 22, 2023 ·  3 comments

The 19th-Century dress in which the codes were found. Image Credit: Sara Rivers Cofield When Sara Rivers-Cofield purchased a Victorian-era silk dress in Maine 10 years ago, the last thing she expected to find was a crumpled up ball of papers stuffed inside a mysterious hidden pocket.

Written on the pages were dozens of lines of seemingly random words such as "Spring, wilderness, lining, one, reading, novice" and "Calgary, Cuba, unguard, confute, duck, fagan" which, at a glance, appeared to be little more than gibberish nonsense.

After she shared the writing on her blog, online sleuths quickly determined that what she had found was some sort of secret message written in a code that none of them were able to decipher.

The 'Silk Dress cryptogram' - as it came to be known - was so difficult to crack, in fact, that it went on to gain quite a level of notoriety and was at one point considered one of the top 50 unsolved codes in the world.

Eventually, though, computer analyst Wayne Chan managed to figure it out.Intriguingly, the code was actually something used by the United States Army and the Weather Bureau in the 19th-Century to communicate weather forecasts as cheaply as possible.

The reason this was necessary was down to the cost-per-word of sending a telegram at the time.

Chen even determined the exact date of the codes - May 27th, 1888.

Given the rather mundane nature of the messages and the fact that only a few government officials were likely to have ever sent or received them, it is perhaps no surprise that this particular code was mostly forgotten.

Exactly how these examples ended up in the secret pocket of a dress, however, remains a mystery.

Source: Science Alert | Comments (3)

Tags: Secret, Code