CHAPTER ONE

Codes for Life

The most common codes and ciphers are in your wallet and they are
used every day.

Do you use secret codes? Do you look for and understand strange
symbols?

Do you send and receive messages that only a few other people can
understand?

You are probably not a spy, but you certainly use a great number of
secret codes, ciphers, symbols and messages. Everyone does! For example,
which of these symbols makes you think of the word stop?

Most of these symbols for stop are familiar around the world, but
some symbols have different meanings for different people. The colour red
might mean stop or danger to some people, but in China it often means let's
celebrate.

Symbols for ideas like stop are not meant to be secret. Many codes
are just shorter or faster ways of explaining other ideas. A stop sign really
says, 'Please wait here for a moment and look around. Are you sure there
are no other cars or people that might cause you to have an accident?' It
would take too long to read all this at every corner.

Even language is a code. Although you can read the words in this
book, you probably could not understand a common word like stop in more
than a few languages. Other languages might look like secret codes to you.
On the other hand, you may use or invent a new language that older people
do not understand. Do you understand the word codes in text messaging?
For example, do you understand this message? GR8 2 C U * This is not
meant to be secret code, but many people do not understand it.
 Personal codes

Only your close friends may understand your personal codes, like
hand signs, lesson notes and the special meanings of the clothes you wear.
Your clothes often show that you are in a certain mood or belong to a
certain group.

For example, what does it mean when you wear a T-shirt and jeans? It
could be a code to tell other people that you are relaxed. Uniforms are
formal clothes that give information about a persons school or job. Among
soldiers, a uniform and its decorations give a lot of information about the
soldiers position and abilities.

A mistake in your choice of clothes is usually just embarrassing, but

sometimes it is dangerous. A few years ago, gang members killed a young
man in Los Angeles while he walked in the wrong part of the city wearing a
red jacket. Red was the colour of another gang. Each gang painted symbols
on local buildings to mark their space. This was another kind of code, but
the young man probably could not understand their meaning or the danger
he was in.

Money and prices

But the most common codes and ciphers are in your wallet and they
are used every day. Most paper money and bankcards include one or more
code numbers to try to stop people printing or stealing money.

Secret codes are also used on almost everything you buy. Bar codes
can be read by computer; they give information about the product,
including its name and how much it costs. Two shops can use the same bar
code on the same product, but decide to price it differently.

Long before computers, though, there were other ways to hide

information about prices. Shop managers sometimes used an easy-to-
remember ten-letter word like background to write the cost of products. The
letters in background represented the numbers zero to nine.
 For example, the manager of a carpet shop could write the four letters
urad on a carpet to show that it cost him 75 pounds 19 pens. When a
customer came into the shop, the manager could look at the code and start
to discuss the price. The shop manager knew exactly what he could afford
to charge.

Simple ciphers

Each letter or symbol in a simple cipher represents a different letter.

In the simplest cipher, each of the twenty-six letters in the English alphabet
represents a different letter, like the next letter. In this example, the letters
are listed from the last to the first.

The message Do you have a secret for me? Becomes wl blfszev z

hvxivg uli nr. But cipher breakers might guess that single-letter words in the
ciphered message are either a or I. They might also guess that two-letter
pairs are common words like or; as, do, of or to. To make the cipher more
difficult, you can run the letters together: wlblfezevzhvxivgulinv. Or you
can break them into groups of four letters each: wlblfize vzbv xivg ulin v.

Instead of letters, you can use numbers or symbols. You can write l
for a, 2 for b to make the message: 981 22 51 1953185 20 61518 25 1521.
Your friends will be able to decipher the message as ihaveasecretfotyou. By
adding spaces and a capital letter, they will have the true message: I have a
secret for you.

Another kind of cipher is shown below. You write the numbers,

symbols or letters in rows Irom left to right, with empty squares for spaces:

Then you write the letters from top to bottom, so the message
becomes iee y cfoharoua er vst. To make it more difficult, you can agree
that your friend will change the order of the columns from 1,2, 3, 4, 5 to 5,
3, 4, 1,2 so the message becomes vst harou a er ieey cfo.
 The Vigenere cipher

Although these ciphers seem hard to understand at first, a patient

enemy could break them quite easily. A Frenchman, Blaise de Vigenere,
invented the next big step in code-making in the 1500s. Vigenere used rows
of alphabets; each row started with a new letter. This part of the cipher was
not a secret. The secret part was a code word, like SMILE. After you
choose your code word, you can start to write your message in cipher. Find
the column headed by the first letter of your message and move straight
down to the place where the column meets the row that begins with S (the
first letter of SMILE). That is your first letter. The next letter comes from
the row that starts with M. Vigenere's cipher looked like the one on the next
page.

The message I will not tell, using smile as the code word, looks like
this:

Codeword: s mile smi lesm

Sentence: I will not tell

Cipher text: a iqwp fab eidx

It took a long time to write a message in the Vigenere cipher, but it

was very difficult to decipher. It is useful that a letter like "L" in the
sentence above is represented by four different letters. That makes it
difficult to find the solution unless you know or can guess the code word.

But this was also an important weakness of the Vigenere cipher.

People often , hose words that were easy to remember. If you knew enough
about the person, then you would probably guess that his or her secret code
word was the name of a friend, a family member, a hero, a place or even a
hobby.

Like all secret codes and ciphers, the Vigenere cipher was only as
good as the people who knew it. If one person was forced to share the secret
code word, then the cipher was easy to break.
 CHAPTER TWO

War Secrets

Many of history's secret codes and ciphers - and the ways of breaking
them - have probably been lost.

Companies keep business secrets. People like to keep personal

secrets. But some of the worlds most important secrets are about war.

When countries decide to fight each other, it is always important for

them to keep their plans secret. During a war, soldiers also need to share
their plans in secret. To keep secrets, governments and armies need codes
and ciphers that are easy to use but hard to break. But they also need to
understand the many ways of breaking enemy codes and ciphers.

Breaking the Vigenere cipher

Many people thought that the Vigenere cipher was unbreakable. It

was used for 300 years before the English scientist Charles Babbage
discovered how to break it. But he never told anyone about his secret
method - or did he? Some people believe that he told the British
government.

From 1854 to 1856, the Ottomans (in the area that is now Turkey),
Britain, France and Austria fought in the Crimean War against Russia. The
war started after Russia sent part of its army to Turkey. Thousands of
soldiers fought around the area of the Black Sea in southern Russia. The
Russians used the Vigenere cipher and lost the war. Perhaps their enemies
were able to break the cipher and read their messages.

Many of history's secret codes and ciphers - and the ways of breaking
them - have probably been lost. After a war, no government wants to share
this information; the codes may be needed again. But people did not mind
writing about them when both sides knew that they had been broken.

An early war cipher

One of the first records of the use of a secret cipher in war was in
Greece. About 2,400 years ago, soldiers in the Spartan army stretched a
long piece of paper around a stick. Then they wrote the letters of a message
along the length of the stick. When the paper was taken off, the letters were
in an odd order. The letters seemed to make no sense.

Spartan soldiers hid these messages around their waist, under their
belts. If they could not escape from an enemy, they would destroy the paper.
Even if enemy soldiers found the paper, they needed to stretch the paper
around the same size stick to understand the message.

Caesar's cipher

A litle more than 2,000 years ago, the Roman leader Julius Caesar
invented another cipher. Caesar needed to send messages to his soldiers but
wanted to make sure that no one could read them easily. He developed a
simple cipher in which letters of the alphabet were moved a few letters
forward. For example:

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

defghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabc

This type of cipher was very easy to break; the enemy simply had to
try each, of the twenty-five letters after the starting letter. But Caesar
probably did not i are for two reasons. First, most of his enemies could not
read or write - but they might recognise a few words if a simple cipher was
not used. And, second, most of his messages were probably only important
for a short time. By the time Caesar's enemies understood a message, it was
too late for them to do anything about it.

A more complicated cipher is an arrangement of letters in a different

order.

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

wogxhpbqrijyszctkdulvemfna

But this cipher still has problems. When you look at a message, you
will notice that some letters appear more often than others. In English, "e"
is the most common letter. Also, messages need more than just words. What
is the difference between these two messages?

Kill the king.

Kill the king?

One message is a command to kill the king and the other asks should
someone kill the king? So, it is useful to add these symbols: ? ! , . : ;

It is also useful to include the numbers zero to nine as part of a cipher.

If some words are used often, then they can also have their own code. For
example, if an army often uses a word like submarine, then it may want to
invent a special word or symbol for it.

Often ciphers contain letters that do not mean anything. These can be
used in two ways. Messages are often written with no breaks between the
letters.

Thesoldiersarenowhere.

But what two meanings could this message have? It makes a

difference where you put the spaces between words. If you put them before
the first s, a and n, the message says: The soldiers are nowhere. But if you
put them before the first s, a, n and the h, the message says something quite
different: The soldiers are now here. For this reason, you can add extra
symbols, numbers or letters to show where the spaces should go.
 These extra symbols are also sometimes added to confuse someone
trying to read the code. If you and the other person know that the and sign
means nothing, you can use it and a few other odd symbols to break up
words. You can also use wrong spellings to maake it haardor too decsifer.
 Waving flags

More than 2,000 years ago, Greek and Roman armies used lights and
flags to send messages. One message could be sent to many different
people. If the signals were in code or cipher, an army could send different
messages to its soldiers right in from of their enemies. But both lights and
flags could only be seen over short distances. Around the year 1600, the
telescope became popular and let people send and receive messages over
greater distances.

Before radio, it was difficult to send and receive messages on a ship,

especially , during wartime. Ships used many kinds of flags to share
information or give older. I he most famous flag message was a nine-word
code ordered by Horatio Nelson, before he fought at Trafalgar in 1805:
'England expects that every man will do his duty.

These flags are still used, especially when a ship's radio does not
work. They include flags to show that someone on the ship is ill, that
someone has fallen into the ocean and that the ship will soon leave or arrive
at a port. Flag messages are still often used as decorations and there are
different flags for each letter of the alphabet to spell out messages.

People became very quick at sending flag messages, but it was not
fast enough. A faster way was to use semaphore.

Semaphore flags let people spell messages using the letters of the
alphabet. Some letters are also used to signal numbers and mistakes.

The flags are usually square and in two colours. On land, the flags are
usually red and white. On the ocean, the flags are usually red and yellow.
They are held like the hands of a clock and there are seven positions for
each flag.
 The wrong message

Not all secret messages are meant for your friends. Sometimes an
army or group of soldiers will send a false message. Often, these false
messages help to discover what the enemy knows or is doing.

During World War 2, Americans believed that the Japanese were

going to send their ships to attack Midway Island or Alaska in June, 1942.
The Americans already knew the Japanese ciphers and the Japanese had
communicated about an attack in their secret messages. But the Japanese
messages did not say where they were going to attack.

To find out, the Americans sent a message using an old code - one
they knew that the Japanese had already broken. The message said that
Midway Island's water treatment plant was not working.

Soon, the Japanese began sending messages about the need for water
on Midway Island. They were worried that there would not be enough water
for their army after they made their surprise attack. The Americans listened
to these radio messages and knew that the Japanese planned to attack
Midway Island.

They sent their ships to Midway and destroyed Japan's ships and
planes.
 CHAPTER THREE

A Queens Mistake

Instead of helping Mary, Elizabeth sent her to a counry house. Mary

was forced to stay there. She was Elizabeth's prisoner.

The sad story of Mary, Queen of Scots shows that it is not always an
advantage in life to be royal - or to be skilled in the use of codes.

Mary's father was King James V of Scotland. His wife was French
and Mary was born in 1542. Mary's father died when she was just six days
old, and went she was a year old she became Queen of the Scots. At five
years old, she was sent to France. It was not safe for her in Scotland,
England's King Henry VIII wanted to take Scotland, and he began to attack
the country.

At the age of fifteen, Mary married Francis, son of the King of Ft am

e. but he died two years later and she returned to Scotland. Her next
marriage was to her Scottish cousin, Henry Stewart, and they had one child,
a son. But Stewart made many enemies. These enemies tried to kill him
once and failed, the so mid time, they were successful. Most people thought
that one of Stewart's killers was Lord Bothwell.

Two queens

A few months later, Mary married Lord Bothwell. But other lords
were angered by his new position and Mary ran away to England to ask for
help from her cousin, Elizabeth I. Elizabeth was worried, though, about
Mary's Catholic religion. England's kings and queens had also followed the
Catholic religion until Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII, had made England a
Protestant country. So many English Catholics wanted Mary to be queen of
England, not Elizabeth. Instead of helping Mary, Elizabeth sent her to a
country house. Mary was forced to stay there. She was Elizabeth's prisoner.

Mary was not punished in any way and even had servants to help her,
but she could not travel or have visitors without Elizabeth's permission,
Years passed and Mary began to understand that she would die as a
prisoner.

Still, she had some hope. The Catholic king of Spain, Philip II, was
ready to attack England after Elizabeth died. French armies also wanted to
attack England but were afraid of Elizabeth. And there were many people in
England who did not want Elizabeth to be their queen. Both Mary and
Elizabeth heard news about these unhappy people from their own spies. The
kings and queens of England had had spies since 1324, when King Edward
II ordered all letters to or from England to be opened and read.

A royal cipher

Mary had a special way to get news from her friends and supporters.
Every few days, Gilbert Gifford delivered beer to the house where Mary
stayed. He left full beer containers and picked up the empty ones. But they
were not completely empty. Both the full containers and the empty ones
often had secret notes hidden in them. Mary's servants put one message
inside a container and took another out.

Gifford's job was to deliver the messages between Mary and her spy,
Anthony Babington. Babington had many contacts among important people
who wanted to kill Elizabeth. But he and Mary both knew they had to be
careful. If anyone found the messages, then Babington would certainly be
killed. Even Mary might be killed. Instead of writing in plain English, Mary
used her own personal secret cipher.

Mary's cipher used numbers and symbols for twenty-three letters of

the alphabet - there were no symbols for j, v or w. There were also symbols
that meant nothing. These could be used between words as spaces or just to
confuse anyone reading the message. Mary also had twenty-four other
symbols that were used as codes for her name and for common words, and
one symbol to show double letters.

Mary thought that no one would find her secret messages, but she was
wrong. She also thought that if anyone found the messages, then they would
not be able to read her secret cipher, but she was wrong again. Gilbert
Gifford was really working for Elizabeth's secretary, Sir Francis
Walsingham.

Walsingham wanted to get rid of Mary but knew that Elizabeth was
afraid of killing a Catholic queen. She thought it would anger other Catholic
kings and queens and perhaps start a war with the rest of Europe. She was
also afraid that Elizabeth's own people would not like it and would fight
against her. Walsingham needed clear information to show that Mary
wanted to kill Elizabeth and he found it in the secret letters.

The final message

When Gifford received a letter from Mary, he gave it to Walsingham

before he gave it to Babington. Walsingham gave it to Thomas Phelippes, a
language specialist. Phelippes was good at breaking secret ciphers. He
copied the message and he and his team started working on it. Each letter
was quickly returned to Gifford so he could give it to Babington. It was
important that Mary and Babington should not notice an unusual delay.

Phelippes studied the ciphered messages using a method developed

by an Arab code breaker named Abu Yusuf al-Kindi. When al-Kindi looked
at different languages, he discovered that some letters were used much more
than others. In English, the order of the most common letters is: e, t, a, o, i,
n, s, h, r, d, l, u. The letter e usually appears about thirteen times in one
hundred letters. The least common letter, z, only appears once.

Phelippes quickly deciphered the message by finding some letters and

guessing at others. Soon, Walsingham could read everything that Mary and
Babington wrote. Babington explained his plans to kill Queen Elizabeth as
well as Walsingham and others. Mary wrote back and said she understood.
This was the message Walsingham was waiting for. But Babington wrote
about six other men who would help him. Walsingham wanted to know
their names too.

Walsingham asked Phelippes to add a few sentences to the letter

before Gifford gave it to Babington. Phelippes used Mary's code and copied
her handwriting. In the new message, Phelippes asked Babington for the
names of the other six men.

Perhaps Babington knew that something was wrong. He tried to leave

England for Spain but was taken prisoner. He and twelve other men wen-
hanged. The next year, Mary was taken to a special court. At first, she was
calm and said she knew nothing about the plans to kill Elizabeth or to invite
the Spanish king to attack England. But then the court showed Mary her
own letters and she could not deny it. At the age of forty-four, Mary had her
head cut off.

A secret diary

Many other people have used personal ciphers, for different reasons.
One famous cipher was used by Samuel Pepys. His cousin got him a job in
the government in London. Pepys was intelligent and a hard worker and he
was soon given better and better jobs. In time, he became a friend of the
king of England, Charles II. Pepys was a witness to many exciting events in
the history of England, like the Great Fire of London. During this fire,
much of the city burned down.

In 1659, Pepys was twenty-seven years old and he decided to start

writing a diary. He wrote his diary in a cipher so others could not read it
especially his wife! He used different symbols and he also mixed words
from English, French and Portuguese as a kind of a code. Pepys wrote for
himself and not for a newspaper or because he wanted to sell his diary in
bookshops. So he did not try to make things sound better or worse than they
really were. Today, Pepys's diaries give us a clear picture of an important
time in English history.
 Remembering ciphers

Pepys's cipher was common when he lived, but after he died in 1703
his diaries were not read for more than a hundred years. By then, no one
remembered the cipher. Finally, in 1819, a man named Thomas Shelton
spent three years deciphering the diaries. Sadly, he did not know that the
cipher key was in another book on a bookshelf above the diaries!

A big problem with ciphers is teaching people how to understand and

remember them. Until 1915, the Russian army used an old cipher that was
easy to break because poorly trained Russian soldiers could not remember
newer ciphers. The Chinese general Sun Tzu had faced the same problem
2,500 years earlier. He used the first forty words of a poem. After soldiers
learned the poem, it was easy to teach them that each word in the poem was
a code word for something else.

Mistakes

The stories of Mary, Queen of Scots, Samuel Pepys and the Russians
show how one cannot always be confident about secret codes and ciphers.
Mary believed that no one would ever discover the secret of her royal
cipher. She knew enough to use a secret cipher, but not enough to
understand that it could be broken. That mistake cost her, her life.

Mary's cipher did not protect her because she did not know the people
who worked with her well enough. It was easy for one so-called friend to
work with her enemies.

Samuel Pepys had the opposite problem. He wrote in cipher only to

stop his wife from reading about his private life. When he left directions to
give his books to Cambridge University, he wanted someone to read his
diaries. But the diaries were almost lost and forgotten.
 It is hard to understand the Russian Army's use of an old cipher that
they knew their enemies could decipher. Why did they not develop a new
cipher or code? No one will ever know.
 CHAPTER FOUR

Unsolved Codes and Ciphers

The letter explained that the box contained secret information about a
fortune in gold, silver and jewels.

In 1885, a small but unusual book was printed in the United States. It
was called The Beale Papers. It tells a very strange story about a mysterious
lost fortune.

The mystery began in 1820 with a man called Robert Morriss.

Morriss owned a hotel in Lynchburg, Virginia, in the United States. One
day, he had a few new visitors to his hotel, Thomas Jefferson Beale and his
friends. Beale was intelligent and kind. He stayed for about ten days and
became friends with Morriss. Morriss said later that Beale was a handsome
man but that his face was very dark, like the face of a man who had spent a
lot of time in the sun.

Beale left but he returned after two years and asked Morriss to keep
something for him. It was a small locked metal box and Beale told his
friend that there were important papers inside. A little later, Beale sent
Morriss a letter.

The letter explained that the box contained secret information about a
fortune in gold, silver and jewels. Beale promised to send the key for the
box and information for decoding the messages inside it. The letter also said
that Morriss should open the box in ten years if Beale did not return.

Beale did not return. Nothing was ever heard from him again. He did
not send the key and he did not explain the secrets. Morriss guessed that
Native Americans had killed Beale. But he forgot about the box and did not
open it until 1845.
 The box contained a few letters and other papers, including three
pages of numbers. Morriss did not understand the pages of numbers, but
one of the letters was quite exciting.

An explanation

The letter said that in 1818 Beale and about thirty other men had
travelled in the American Southwest. Somewhere around Santa Fe, New
Mexico, they had found gold and silver - lots of it! They traded some of the
heavy silver for lighter jewels and took everything to the eastern United
States. They then buried their fortune in a secret place in the ground where
no one would find it.

The letter also explained the three pages of numbers. The first page, it
said, described where the secret fortune was buried. The second page
explained what was included in the fortune. The third page gave the names
of the people who should share the gold, silver and jewels. These were the
relatives of the men who found the fortune.

Giving away secrets

Morriss could not work out the strange numbers on the secret pages.
For many years he tried to understand them, but he did not know where to
start. In 1862, he gave the box and its papers to another man, J. B. Ward, to
look at.

Ward found a clue to the second of the three pages. He decided that
there were too many numbers for them to be ciphers for letters. Instead, he
guessed that each number represented a word in a book. The question was:
which book?

Ward decided that it must be a popular or famous book or document

that anyone could find. Also it must be one that existed when Beale wrote
his pages of numbers. He started looking at different books and documents
to see if one had words that matched the numbers in a meaningful way.
Finally, he found an American government document that matched the
second page of numbers.

Ward compared the numbers and words and finally understood one of
the three parts of the secret. This second page explained that the fortune
was in Bedford, Virginia. It included 460 kilograms of gold, and 1,729
kilograms of silver. There were also many jewels.

The letter also explained that the gold, silver and jewels were 'packed
in iron pots with iron covers'. All the pots were buried in a hole in the
ground, about two meters deep, and covered with stones. The message said
that the exact place was given in the first page of numbers.

But the government document did not give clues to the first or the
third pages of numbers. Ward tried to find answers for the next twenty-three
years, but he failed. In 1885, he explained everything in his book.

People became very excited about the mystery of The Beale Papers.
Many did not wait to solve the mystery of the first page. They started to dig
all around Bedford. The townspeople dug up their own gardens and farms.

But the fortune has never been found. Even today, people still look for
it. In today's money, the value of the gold, silver and jewels is about
10,000,000 pounds.

A big joke?

Cipher breakers continue to look for solutions to the first and third
pages in books as well as in other places. For example, old stories from
Native Americans in the west of the United States talked about people
taking their gold to east of the country. Were these old stories about Beale?
Perhaps the other pages are not the same kind of book code.

But other people think the Beale story is not true - that The Beale
Papers is just a joke. They have looked for information about Morriss,
Beale and Ward. Morriss was probably a real person, but little information
can be found about Beale or Ward. Some people say it is not likely that gold
was found where the letter says it was. And why did Beale write letters in
three different ciphers? Why not just use one? There are a lot of questions.

Language specialists say that Beale uses words in his letter that were
not popular in 1822. Perhaps someone else - not Beale - wrote the letters
much later. But why would anyone go to so much trouble?

One reason might be money - but not for the fortune-hunters. Ward's
book was very popular and made him a lot of money. Perhaps he simply
made up the story. At the end of the The Beale Papers, Ward gives some
good advice. He warns readers not to waste too much time looking for
clues.

The Voynich Manuscript

Twenty-seven years after Ward's Beale Papers book came out, an

American book collector, Wilfred Voynich, visited an old house outside
Rome, in Italy.

He found an old manuscript that was handwritten sometime around

the 15'h century.

The pages of the book are about the size of this book's pages, but the
Voynich Manuscript is much thicker and much more difficult to understand.
It is completely in cipher.

No one has been able to understand it.

The Voynich Manuscript is also filled with very unusual pictures.

Many of them look like scientific drawings of plants and views from
telescopes. But there are also many small, odd pictures of women in baths.
The baths are connected like the branches of plants. One solution may be to
study as many old European languages as possible and search for a cipher
that fits.
 A musical cipher?

The British musician Edward Elgar loved puzzles and secret codes.
He even put them into some of his music. On 14 July 1897, Elgar sent a
letter to Miss Dora Penny, the daughter of a friend of Elgars wife. The letter
included a cipher.

Penny was not able to decipher the message and Elgar never gave her
the answer. To guess the meaning, people have looked at what Elgar and
Penny both knew about and liked: walking in the countryside, football,
horse racing and music. But Penny was not a very good musician and Elgar
would not send her a musical message that was too difficult to decipher.
Elgar died in 1934 and Penny died in 1964.

The Zodiac Cipher

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Zodiac Killer murdered at least five
people in California. After he killed them, he wrote letters to police
departments and newspapers. In his letters, he talked about how he killed
the people. He also included messages in cipher.

Each cipher was handwritten on paper. Most of the symbols are

letters, but some are squares, circles and other shapes. Some are filled in
and others have dots in them. Some of the cipher text has been broken. We
now know that the killer used seven different symbols for the letter E and
did not have any symbols for some other letters.

The killer explained that one of the codes gave his real name, but no
one has been able to discover it. There are many unsolved ciphers. Perhaps
you will solve them one day.
 CHAPTER FIVE

Hidden Writing

Britain's spy department qtuckly contacted Dawes. He was not a

German spy and he did not have special information - but his students did!

Secret codes and ciphers are not the only ways to hide secrets. Often,
people do not use secret codes at all. Instead, they hide the messages that
they want to send. For example, a Greek king wrote a message to another
king on the shaved head of a slave. The slaves hair grew back and he
travelled to see the second king. The second king shaved his head and read
the message. This was an unusual way to send a message and it was not
very fast.

Secret inks

There are many other interesting ways to hide secret messages. For
example, you can use inks that cannot be seen. Most paper money now uses
these kinds of inks. When you hold paper money up to a special light, you
can read extra information.

You can use another kind of secret ink at home. Simply write your
message in orange juice or milk and let it dry. The writing should then
disappear and you can send your secret message to your friends. When your
friends receive the message, they can warm it gently over a toaster. The heat
will make the hidden writing appear again. But be careful not to burn the
paper!

If an enemy saw a plain piece of paper in the mail, he would wonder

what it was all about. So it is better to write a false letter with unimportant
information in it. Make the lines of your sentences a little wider and write
your true message between them.
 Cheap messages

Another way to send a hidden message is to write an ordinary

message but mark certain letters. Many years ago, it was inexpensive to
send newspapers in England but expensive to send letters. People found an
interesting way to save money.

They used a needle to make small holes under different letters. The
message could be anywhere in the newspaper. You only needed a story with
all the letters for your message in the right order. For example, Charlbury's
most beautiful garden, at this time of year, is an old one: wild Cornbury
Park.

When the underlined letters are taken out, the message becomes
meetmeinlondon. With spaces and capital letters added, the message
becomes clear: Meet me in London. Can you read the message in the lines
below?

The message could be much more difficult if you also used a cipher. It
would also help if you made holes under letters on other pages, so an enemy
would not know which page to look at.

A similar way to hide a message is to cut holes in two pieces of plain

paper. You give one of the pieces to your friend and keep the other piece.
You then put a piece of writing paper under the piece with the holes and
write your message. When you take away the top piece of paper, the one
underneath has your message. To hide it, you write in other words between
the words of your message.

Dear Aunt Mabel, Did you hear the news on the radio today? My
favourite team will be in town next month. But I can't go. I have to do too
much work on the second and third. Oh, see you later. The cat is in the tree
again! I will write again tomorrow. Peter
 A dangerous word puzzle

In 1945, a British newspaper printed a word puzzle by a schoolteacher

called Leonard Dawe. The answers to the puzzle included five unusual
words: the names of an American state, an American city, an unusual tree
and the Roman god of the sea, and a word for a leader. It was near the end
of World War 2 and the British and Americans were worried. These five
words were all important code words used by their armies in planning
attacks against the German army in France.

Britain's spy department quickly contacted Dawes. He was not a

German spy and he did not have special information - but his students did!
They had suggested the words and helped Dawes write the puzzle. Where
did they learn the words? Dawes's students liked to play around a British
army camp and had often heard soldiers use the code words. The students
did not know what the words meant, but thought they sounded important.
They had not told Dawes where they heard the words.

Coded pictures

Not all messages can be written in code. Sometimes spies need to

send pictures.

In 1892, soldiers at an important German army building in Dalmatia,

on the Mediterranean Sea, enjoyed laughing at Robert Baden-Powell. He
ran all around the fields outside the building and explained his insect
drawings to anyone who was interested.

But his drawings were more important. They were really drawings of
the building, showing the position of each gate and big gun. They were just
drawn to look like insects. At other times, Baden-Powell hid a drawing of
another building by making it look like an old church window.

Baden-Powell was a spy for many years in India, Africa and Europe.
In 1915, he wrote a book about his life, My Adventures as a Spy. He
described many ways of hiding messages. In Africa, he wrote his messages
on small pieces of paper and made them into balls. These were hidden in
holes in walking sticks or covered in small, thin sheets of metal and worn
around a messenger's neck. If an enemy stopped you, you could drop the
balls and they looked like small stones. Later, you could return and pick
them up.

Another method was to write the two arms of semaphore symbols and
connect several symbols in a line. These lines could be fitted onto the side
of a drawing.

A semaphore message: 'Flags share secrets'

Because he was good at spying, Baden-Powell was also good at

catching other spies. In his book, he explains how people used lights and
chimney smoke to send signals. Sometimes, they carried lights into fields to
send signals. If anyone asked, they would pretend to look for a lost animal.
When Baden-Powell died, a circle with a dot was put on the stone where he
was buried. It is code for 'gone home.

Strange places

Secrets have been hidden in many different places, even in food! In

the year 1280, Kublai Khan and the Mongols became the rulers of China.
The Chinese became their slaves. In 1368, the Chinese decided to fight
back. To share their plans, they asked all their bakers to hide messages in
special cakes served during the August Moon celebrations. Only the
Chinese ate these mooncakes - not the Mongols. Inside each mooncake was
a piece of paper with the message, 'Kill all the Mongols!' The Chinese
people started a war and won. They became the rulers of the country again.

Many spies carried secrets in hidden places. When the enemy

searched them, their secrets would not be noticed. During World War 2,
doctors visited prisoners and brought them new clothes. They took the old
clothes with them. But the prisoners often wrote secret messages in very
small letters on parts of their old clothes. The doctors found these and gave
them to the prisoners' governments and families.
 The backs of shirt and coat buttons were another popular place to hide
secret messages. If an enemy was near, you would tear off the secret button
and destroy it or throw it away. Often, spies used ordinary things like
pencils and coins with hollow spaces to hide messages.

Photographs are more difficult to hide. But after very small cameras
were invented, their pictures could be made into small dots. These dots
were hidden in unlikely places. One favourite place was behind a stamp on
a letter. Other photographic dots were sometimes hidden somewhere on a
spy's body.

Now a photograph or page of text can he hidden inside another

photograph and then sent by computer. Only a computer with the right code
can read the information. At one business, a boss wondered about one of his
employees. The employee sent email messages with pictures to his
'grandmother' every day. It was strange that she never wrote back. Finally,
the boss found out that the employee was hiding company information in
the photographs and sending it to another business.

Computers have made it much easier to hide secrets, but some secrets
are hidden where everyone can see them. One spy used code words in a car
advertisement to share information about meetings. The message could only
be recognised by someone who knew the code. Another spy used coloured
pins on a telephone post to give different messages. But while people hide
messages, other people will always look for ways to discover them.
 CHAPTER SIX

Secret Symbols

After his African American helper was beaten by a Ku Klux Klan

gang,

Kennedy decided to try to destroy the organisation.

What does it mean when you get a letter with the stamp upside down?
It may just mean that the sender was in a hurry. But in some countries, like
China, it is a sign that there is a love letter inside.

We are surrounded by secret symbols. Many people never notice most

of them. When you get in a lift, you will see a few rows of raised dots next
to the buttons. You may know that they are for the blind, but what do they
mean?

Writing for the blind

The dots are a way of writing called Braille. It is named after Louis
Braille, the man who invented it. Braille was born in a small town near
Paris in 1809. His father made shoes for a living. When Braille was four
years old, he went into his father's shop and tried to make some shoes. He
took a pointed metal tool and made holes in pieces of leather.

Braille had an accident and the tool went into his right eye. Soon after
that, he lost sight in the eye. This was bad news, but it got worse. Braille
slowly lost sight in his left eye. He was now blind.

For two years, Braille still went to the local school, but he was not
learning anything and could not read or write. Braille finally went to a
special school for blind boys in Paris. The school was like a prison and the
boys were badly beaten for the smallest mistakes. They learned simple jobs
that they could do without using their eyes.

The students did not learn how to write, hut the school did try to teach
them how to read. There were few books for the blind and they all used
raised letters on the page. But it was difficult to read them because the
letters all felt too similar.

In 1821, Braille met a soldier called Charles Barbier. Barbier had

invented a way for soldiers to communicate at night without speaking or
using lights. Barbier used twelve raised dots on paper for soldiers to feel.
But the cipher was too difficult for soldiers to learn or remember. Braille
thought he could make it simpler to help blind people to read. He used
different arrangements of six dots for writing letters and numbers and even
invented dot ciphers for mathematics and music.

Braille's alphabet for the blind was not an immediate success. Braille
became a teacher at his old school, but another teacher refused to allow his
students to learn it. But the students loved the new and easy way to read.
They began learning it in secret. Blind people everywhere liked to write
messages in their own Braille letters.

Braille writing is now found around the world, on everything from

buildings to paper money.

Hobo signs

Hobos are not so common now, but there used to be a lot of them in
North America. They were mostly men, who travelled from place to place
to find work. Often, the cheapest way to travel was to jump on a train. But it
was against the law and it was dangerous. The train companies did not want
to give free rides to hobos. They hired gangs of strong men to get rid of
them. Sometimes, the gangs killed the hobos. Sometimes the hobos fell
under train wheels as they tried to escape, or they froze in winter.
 When hobos went to a new place, they left signs around the town to
share information with other hobos. These signs were usually small
drawings near the door or gate of a house or business. Most people did not
notice them. If they did, they might think that the signs were accidental
marks or simply children's drawings.

In this way, the hobos shared information about food, work and
dangers.

The underground railway

From 1861 to 1865, armies from the North and South of the United
States fought each other. The war was mostly about African American
slaves. Many people in the South wanted to keep them as cheap workers,
but many people in the North wanted the slaves to go free. During this time,
slaves escaped from the South and travelled to the North on the
'Underground Railroad'.

The Underground Railroad was not underground and it was not a

railway. It was a group of people who helped slaves escape. It was
dangerous to escape and dangerous to help slaves. These helpers had many
secret ways to tell slaves where there was a safe house for them to rest. One
way was to hang colourful blankets on their washing lines.

These colourful blankets had interesting patterns. Most people

thought that they were just pretty. But slaves knew what the patterns meant.
A pattern of flying birds showed the best direction to take for an escape to
Canada, the first country in the world to make slavery illegal.

When the Underground Railroad was ready for more slaves to escape,
the helpers put out blankets with pictures of wheels and tools on them.

The wheels meant that it was time to go; the tools meant that the
slaves should bring tools to help them.
 Some tools could help them find new work. Other tools could be used
for protection. There were many signs for danger. One pattern warned
slaves to change direction often, like a person who had drunk too much
alcohol.

Superman and the Ku Klux Clan

After the Southern United States lost the war against the North, many
people were unhappy that slaves were free. Six white men from the
American South decided to start an organisation called the Ku Klux Klan,
or KKK. At first, they just met, talked and played games. But soon, the
group also began to terrorize and kill freed slaves.

The KKK became very powerful. It did not cost very much to join,
but a lot of people, mostly men, did join. They paid a small amount of
money that went to the leaders of the KKK. These leaders often used the
money for illegal activities. By 1920, 4,000,000 white Americans belonged
to the KKK.

Stetson Kennedy was born in 1916. He was an American writer who

often wrote about African Americans and he hated the KKK. After his
African American helper was beaten by a KKK gang, Kennedy decided to
try to destroy the organisation. He started by writing about it but few people
were interested. Most thought that nothing could be done to stop the KKK.

In the 1950s, Kennedy decided that he should work against the KKK
from the inside of the organisation. He joined under a false name, pretended
to be a good member of the group (without hurting anyone) and learned all
about the KKK. He gave secret information to the police, politicians and
newspapers, and he wrote more about the organisation, but little was done
about it.

Then Kennedy had an idea. Would he be more successful if he could

make everyone laugh at the KKK? He contacted the makers of Superman, a
radio show for children. Were they interested in a new enemy for Superman
to fight? They were, and Kennedy gave them all the Klan's secret code
words. The writers of the radio show and children loved the new story.
Soon KKK members' own children were playing Superman and KKK - and
the KKK always lost!

When the leaders of the KKK heard their code words on the radio,
they quickly changed them. But because Kennedy was a member, he
learned the new code words and quickly gave them to the writers of the
radio show. The embarrassment hurt the KKK and they soon lost most of
their members. No one wanted to belong to a secret group that was not so
secret.

Kennedy wrote a book about his fight against the KKK. He sold
400,000 copies. Suddenly, many people learned the facts about the KKK
and were not afraid of it anymore. More importantly, it became
embarrassing to be a member. This made even more KKK members leave.
 CHAPTER SEVEN

Puzzles in Fiction

At first, Holmes thinks the message is in code. But then he sees the
meaning.

Every third word is the real message.

The French writer Victor Hugo wrote a book that was translated into
English and sold in Britain. He wanted to know how well the book was
selling, so he sent this message to his British bookseller: ?

The bookseller wrote back to tell him that the book was selling very
well. His message was: !

Many writers also like to use puzzles and secrets in their books.

Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes detective stories are full of

secret codes and symbols. In 'The Adventure of the Red Circle', Sherlock
Holmes solves a case by watching a man walk in front of a window with a
light. The man shows the light once, then several more times, before
stopping and starting again. Holmes understands that the man's light is
communicating one letter after another. One light means a, two lights mean
h, three lights mean c...

Even after Holmes has understood this, the letters do not seem to
make sense. Is there a secret cipher or are they code words? Then he
realizes that the messages are not in English. They are in Italian. Finally,
after a warning is repeated three times, the message is changed to the word
Danger. When the message suddenly stops. Holmes rushes to see what
happened. He finds that the man with the light has been murdered. Holmes
uses the light at the window cipher to help solve the crime.

Lights at a window are also used in another Sherlock Holmes story,

The Hound of the Baskervilles. But these lights are used as a simple code to
warn a criminal. In stories by other writers, people often use mirrors to send
messages and warnings.

In Conan Doyle's 'The Five Orange Pips', a man receives a letter with
five orange seeds in it. His nephew, John, does not understand it and
watches his uncle burn a box full of papers. John's uncle soon dies in a
mysterious way. Later, John's father receives a similar letter, also with five
orange seeds in it. This letter asks him to put the box and its letters outside.
He cannot, because they are already burnt. He soon dies as well. Sherlock
Holmes understands that the five orange seeds are a code for 'you will be
killed'. He promises to help John, but that night John is also murdered.

'The Musgrave Ritual' contains an unusual puzzle that the detective

must solve. Holmes has a friend called Reginald Musgrave. Musgrave has a
strange document that has been in his family for a few hundred years. It
begins like this:

Whose was it?

His who is gone.

Who shall have it?

He who will come.

Where was the sun?

The document then talks about trees and steps and directions. But no
one in the Musgrave family has ever understood it. Two people disappear
while they are working for Musgrave and Holmes tries to find out what
happened. In fact, the document has several map clues to find something
that was hidden long ago.
 It is finally found but looks unimportant: a bag of old metal and
stones. But Holmes cleans them and explains that they are the royal jewels
of the first kings of England.

In 'The Gloria Scott', Holmes goes to visit his old friend, Victor
Trevor.

One night, Trevor's father receives a letter. It is a very simple message

of just two sentences about hunting birds, but Trevor's father is deeply
shocked and he soon dies.

Trevor shows Holmes the letter, but it does not make sense. At first,
Holmes thinks the message is in code. But then he sees the meaning. Every
third word is the real message. Trevor's father has an enemy who has talked
to the police about the father's secret criminal past.

Sherlock Holmes's most famous cipher case is 'The Adventure of the

Dancing Men'. In this story, a man comes to Holmes with a copy of a
drawing that he has seen around the outside of his house. It is a row of stick
figures that appear to be dancing. These dancing men mean nothing to the
man, but they upset his wife. She seems to know their secret, but she will
not tell him.

Holmes looks at the message and begins to guess what each dancing
man might mean. It is a cipher of symbols. Each dancing man is a symbol
for a different letter. Soon, Holmes discovers the meaning of the messages.
But he is too late. The man is dead and the police think that his wife has
killed him. Holmes finds a way to catch the real killer. He uses the Dancing
Men cipher to send a message to the local hotel. The killer quickly comes
there and is caught by the police. Holmes's message is the one above. It
means, 'Come here at once.'

The murderer is surprised that anyone can understand his code.

Holmes explains that one man's invention can always be understood by
another man.
 Edgar Allen Poe

Like Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe was a writer who was
interested in ciphers. He wrote newspaper stories about them and invited
readers to send him secret messages in their own ciphers. People were
surprised that Poe could read their secret messages. But Poe himself only
used very simple ciphers, where one letter or symbol was used for another
letter. Later, though, he wrote about how to solve ciphers and his notes were
used to break German ciphers during World War 1.

Poe also used a secret cipher in his short story 'The Gold Bug'. In the
story, an insect collector draws a picture of an insect he has found. The
drawing is on a piece of paper he has also found. But on the other side of
the paper is something else: an old clue to something that was buried. After
finding a page with secret hidden writing on it and breaking a cipher, the
insect collector finds a fortune in gold.

Poe was a writer. Conan Doyle, who wrote the Sherlock Holmes
stories, was a doctor, not a detective; he started writing detective stories
because not enough sick people came to see him and he needed another way
to make money. But the famous British writer Somerset Maugham really
was a spy.

Somerset Maugham

Maugham was British, but he was born in Paris. When he was very
young, he learned to speak English, French and German. He was so good at
languages that Britain's spy department sent him to be a spy in Geneva, in
Switzerland.

In Switzerland, Maugham pretended to be a French writer. He

collected information from other spies about the German army and sent it
back to England. The information was hidden in code in Maugham's
handwritten books, so the Swiss police never looked at them too carefully.
 After World War 1, Maugham wrote stories about his spy experiences.
But he had to burn most of them because they contained too much secret
information. In 1928, though, he did write a book about his work as a spy in
St Petersburg, Russia. The name of one of the people in the book was
Somerville. This was the name Maugham used when he worked in Russia
as a spy for the British government in 1917.

Johnny Cot His Gun

Not all stories with codes and ciphers are about crimes and spies. In
1939, Dalton Trumbo wrote a book about an American soldier in World
War 1 who loses both arms and both legs and the ability to see, speak or
hear. He eventually uses Morse code to tell his story by hitting his head on
his pillow. Trumbo hated war and wrote the book for people who thought
that war was exciting.

Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code

One of the most popular books in the world today is a story about
secret ciphers and codes. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code has been
translated into forty-four languages. It begins with a murder at the Louvre,
in Paris. There are strange symbols around the body, which the dead man
wrote himself in his own blood.

A man with a specialist interest in symbols and the dead man's

granddaughter, a specialist in ciphers, see them. Together, they follow a
number of clues. Many of the clues are connected with Leonardo da Vinci,
an artist and inventor who lived in Italy five hundred years ago.

On the cover of The Da Vinci Code, there are other clues. These clues
have no relationship with The Da Vinci Code, but are connected with the
subject of Brown's next book. Thousands of readers followed the clues and
were able to solve the puzzle. The clues led them to a piece of art at the
American spy department, the CIA. The work of art is called Kryptos. It is a
large public cipher puzzle with letters cut out of metal.

The Da Vinci Code mixes fact and fiction. One fact is Brown's
description of a tube-shaped container with disks that need to be lined up in
the right order.

If they are not, or if the tube is broken, a bottle of liquid inside will
break and destroy the message. Leonardo da Vinci invented this cipher tube.
 CHAPTER EIGHT

Mountain Fires to Enigma

British scientists could not discover a way to break the code. Finally,
they found the reason...

It has always been difficult to send secret information over great

distances.

When the Greeks celebrated the fall of the city of Troy in 1084 BC,
they immediately wanted to tell their queen, Clytemnestra, the good news.
She was 800 kilometers away in Mycenae, a two-day journey by horse or a
five-day run. Instead, the Greeks used signal fires. The first fire was lit and
then another, 70 kilometers away, as waiting soldiers saw the signal. Each
fire was lit in turn. Twelve signal fires brought Clytemnestra the good news
in a few minutes.

For hundreds of years, fires on the tops of mountains were probably

the fastest and easiest way to send a message across a great distance. But
very little information could be sent this way; usually just a warning or
news that was expected. Also, there were disadvantages; heavy rains or
cloudy weather could make the fires less easy to see. If the soldiers on the
mountains were not paying attention, they could miss a message.

Other places, other ways

People in different parts of the world found other ways to send

messages - smoke signals, for example. Native Americans built a fire and
used a blanket to send up small clouds of smoke. Friends saw the patterns
of smoke and understood the code, but other people might just think that it
was a fire. These signals were not an effective way of sharing information.
Part of the message - or the whole message - might not be seen in time.
Like mountaintop fires, smoke signals might not be seen during bad
weather; they were also useless at night.
 In parts of Africa, drums were used to send messages, especially in
places where you could not see mountains or smoke. People could beat
drums in different ways, so drums could share more information than
mountaintop fires. Drums were also better because people noticed the sound
of drums without looking in their direction. But when enemies heard
drumming, they could drum too, and the noise could make the first message
impossible to understand.

Mechanical semaphore

In the late 1700s, a new idea became popular in France. It was a

mechanical semaphore similar to semaphore signals used over short
distances by soldiers.

Claude Chappe and his three brothers did not have jobs and were
looking for a way to make money. They decided to build mechanical
semaphore stations to send messages from one end of France to the other.
At first, the brothers tried to use large squares of metal that looked like
normal semaphore flags, but these metal flags were not easy to see over
great distances. Instead, the Chappe brothers connected two large metal
arms to a cross-arm. The two metal arms had seven positions each and the
cross-arm had four positions. Together, they could offer a total of 196
symbols, including letters, numbers and special symbols in code.

The brothers built several lines of stations across France. Each station
was on a hilltop twelve to twenty-five kilometers from the next one. There
were, for example, fifteen stations in the 240 kilometers between Paris and
Lille. A fifty-letter message could be sent in an hour.

The Chappe brothers' invention was soon popular not just in France,
but all around Europe. But it still had a few problems. The stations were
hard to see in bad weather and, although the Chappes tried fixing lights to
the arms, the lights could not be seen clearly at night. Messages could be
sent in code. But everyone could see Chappes semaphore stations, so it was
possible that someone could break a code and learn a secret. Few business
people wanted to use the stations. Finally, another invention took the place
of the Chappes' semaphore stations. The inventor was a young American
artist named Samuel Morse.

Morse code

Morse studied drawing and painting, but he was also interested in

electricity and inventions. On an 1832 boat trip from London to New York,
he heard some people talking about electrical magnets. He decided he could
use electrical magnets to send messages over great distances. An electrical
signal could turn a magnet at the other end of a line on and off.

Morse worked on his invention for six years. In 1838, he finally

showed the world a telegraph that could send a message in a code of short
and long sounds. This code could be sent on an electrical line, read at the
other end and turned back into words. Interest was slow at first but then
Morse, and several companies, built long-distance lines to carry news
around the United States.

Although it was very convenient that messages could he printed out

on paper, trained Morse operators could receive fifty words a minute by ear.
Morse code telegraph messages could be sent day or night over any
distance. There was one problem: telegraph lines could be cut or knocked
down in a storm. But people still learn Morse code because it can be sent
with mirrors, lights or bells. The most famous Morse code signal is SOS,
the signal for Help!: ... - ...

Secrets by radio

The invention of radio allowed people to send secret messages

through the air. Even after radio became used more than telegraph lines,
Morse code was still popular. But anyone with a radio could listen to the
messages, so radio messages were often sent in code. This was especially
true during times of war, but also for normal business secrets. For example,
banks frequently sent secret messages to their offices around the world.
 Governments and businesses were always trying to break each other's
secret codes. Most early codes were not too difficult if you were clever and
had some skills in mathematics. But in 1933, the British government began
noticing strange secret Morse code messages from Germany. British
scientists could not discover a way to break the cipher. Finally, they found
the reason: these new messages were made using a new cipher machine
called Enigma, invented by the German inventor Arthur Scherbius.

At first, Scherbius sold the Enigma to German companies, but the

German government soon took an interest in Enigmas ability to offer
'unbreakable' codes.

The machine itself looked like a box with keys and several disks that
turned around each time a new letter was pressed. The Enigma's disks could
be changed and the machine could mix every single letter of a message into
a new and different cipher.

When World War 2 began in 1939, Germany used the Enigma

machine to communicate with its ships and submarines as well as with its
armies abroad. Enigma operators used secret codebooks to broadcast their
Enigma messages each day. The Germans broke other countries' codes and
ciphers and used the information to attack planes and ships in the Atlantic
Ocean. Someone needed to break the Enigma cipher!

Breaking Enigma

Before World War 2, Polish mathematicians were able to steal a

German Enigma machine and began to understand how it worked. But the
Germans then added more disks and made the code more difficult.
Suddenly, Enigma could send a coded message in
159,000,000,000,000,000,000 ways!

The British government hired many of England's top scientists and

mathematicians - and many people who were simply good at word games
and finding solutions to puzzles. They were sent to break the Enigma cipher
at Bletchley Park, a private home with large grounds outside London.
Bletchley Park soon became the center of British code-breaking activities.
Every day, thousands of enemy messages were collected and sent there for
people to work on. Among these code-breakers was the young
mathematician Alan Turing.

Turing had two important ideas that helped to break Enigma. He

learned that no letter could ever be a code for itself; a ciphered A could not
be an A. He also learned that at 6:05 each morning, when German ships and
submarines sent their weather reports using Enigma, they often used similar
words, like times, dates and the German word for 'weather'.

To save time, Turing invented an early computer which matched

coded messages to real words. Turing's computer and codebooks from a
sinking German submarine helped the British solve the Enigma ciphers and
read all secret German messages.

Of course, the British government did not tell the German

government this! Instead, they used the information to stop German attacks
on their ships and to attack German ships, planes and submarines. The
British sent messages about each success in a radio cipher that they knew
the Germans could understand, pretending that their successes were the
results of luck. The Germans believed in Enigma and did not guess the true
situation. Many people think that Britain's use of the Enigma ciphers helped
win the war.

The last Enigma secret

Sadly, after the war, the British government still thought that Enigma
should be a secret. They could not afford to share their knowledge because
Germany or another country might try to use a machine like Enigma again.
The decipherers of the Enigma code were not allowed to talk about the
work. Most of them died before their families and friends learnt that they
were heroes.
 CHAPTER NINE

Speaking in Code

Navajo is also a difficult language to speak. Some sounds in the

language are not said through the mouth - they are only made through the
nose.

Parents often want to say things that they do not want their children to
understand. They might use long words or speak in another language - until
their children learn that language.

Cockney

English speakers sometimes use an invented language when they do

not know another language. Criminals in England learnt to say words
backwards so police and other people could not understand them easily.

Speakers of Cockney, a form of English, use many words that sound

like other words. Boat race, for example, means face- but Cockney speakers
use a short form and just say, 'I like your boat.' In Cockney, the words dog
and bone mean telephone and a Cockney speaker might say, 'I'm on the
dog.' The meaning is very difficult to guess for someone who does not
understand Cockney. Also, Cockney is always changing. It often uses the
names of famous people for new words, so the words change as different
people become famous.

Pig Latin

A different kind of code is Pig Latin. You can speak Pig Latin by
changing the order of letters in English words and adding some letters, such
as ay or yay.
 People speak it in different ways, but here are the two most common
rules:

1. If a word begins with a, e, i, o, u or y add yay to the end of the

word, a = ay ay am = amyay I = iyay in = inyay you = youyay

2. If it does not, take away all the letters before the a, e, i, o, u or y

and put them at the end of the word, followed by ay. big = igbay Latin =
atinlay listen = istenlay pig = igpay secret = ecretsay telling = ellingtay

You can put these words together to say, istenlay iyay amyay
ellingtayyouyay ayay igbay ecretsay inyay igpay atinlay: 'Listen, I am
telling you a big secret in Pig Latin.'

Another code like this places ab before each of the letters a, e, i, o, it

and y in a word. A sentence like I already know that secret, becomes abi
abalrabeabadaby knabow thabat sabecrabet. It sounds difficult but, with
practice, you can do it!

Pig Latin and similar codes are really only used for speaking. If you
write messages in those codes, they are easy to decipher.

Wind Talkers

Time is important for many secret codes and ciphers. With enough
time, a scientist or a spy can break almost any secret code using a computer.
So it is important to send messages that take a long time to break. By the
time your enemy has decoded the message, it is probably no longer
important.

Spoken secret codes and ciphers need to be remembered by the

people who use them, so a lot of training is necessary. But a little-known
language can be a useful code and it can be easy to find speakers of the
language who learned it as children. They do not need as much training.
 Philip Johnston had a special skill and an unusual idea. In 1942, the
United States was in the middle of World War 2. In Europe, Africa and the
Atlantic Ocean, Americans were fighting Germans. In Asia and the Pacific
Ocean, the Americans were fighting the Japanese. Johnston remembered
that in World War 1, seventeen years earlier, Chocataw Native Americans
had used their language on the radio to confuse German soldiers. Johnston
realized that Native American languages could be a good way to send
coded messages. More important, he knew a lot about one Native American
language: Navajo.

Johnston's father had lived and worked with Navajo Native

Americans in the American Southwest, and Johnston had grown up with
Navajo children. As he played with them, he naturally started to learn their
language and customs. In all, he lived among the Navajo for twenty-four
years.

Johnston did not just know how to speak the Navajo language; he also
knew a lot about it. For example, he knew that it was only a spoken
language. There were no letters, symbols or written words in Navajo.
Because of this, there was no dictionary. Few people in the world had ever
studied Navajo.

This meant that there were no written descriptions of how the

language worked and no easy way for people to learn it. Only the Navajo
people themselves, Johnston, and about twenty other people could speak or
understand the Navajo language. Most importantly, German and Japanese
enemies were very unlikely to speak it.

Navajo is a very difficult language to learn. It is quite unlike other

languages. To speak the language, you need to understand how a Navajo
thinks. For example, an English-speaking person may say 'I am hungry', but
a Navajo will translate the idea as 'Hunger is hurting me.'

Navajo is also a difficult language to speak. Some sounds in the

language are not said through the mouth - they are only made through the
nose. Words change meaning if they are said softly or loudly, or with a
movement of the voice up or down. If you do not understand how the
language works, you can hear similar sounds repeated many times and not
understand that they are different words.

Into the army

In early 1942, Johnston went to his local army center and asked to
speak to Clayton P. Vogel. Vogel was a top officer in the United States
Army. Secret codes were important to him and to American soldiers to plan
their attacks and also to call for help when they needed it. But it could be
more dangerous if an enemy heard and understood a message. They needed
a quick way to send messages that could not be easily understood. Often,
these messages needed to be sent in difficult and dangerous conditions.

Johnston explained his idea. Navajo soldiers could translate an

English message and say it over the radio in Navajo. A Navajo speaker
would listen on another radio and translate the message back into English.

In February, 1942, Johnston brought five Navajo speakers together to

meet Vogel. Vogel gave them a test to see how the method could work. Half
of the Navajo were given messages in English. At the same time, soldiers
shouted and made lots of noise with guns to copy war conditions. Other
Navajo speakers received the messages and translated them back into
English. The test worked perfectly. The translated messages were exactly
the same as the ones that were sent.

Later that year, Vogel started a special army training camp for the first
twenty-nine Navajo Native Americans code speakers. They called
themselves Wind Talkers. The Wind Talkers first had to learn about being
soldiers. Next they had to learn about sending and receiving secret codes.
The Navajo language covered many important words like colours, but it did
not cover special army terms for different kinds of guns, bombs, boats,
aeroplanes and land vehicles. The first Navajo Wind talkers developed code
words for these terms. Many of the aeroplanes were named after birds and
many of the boats were named after fish.
 Place names also needed code words. The United States was called
our mother, the islands of Britain were called land between waters and
Spain was called sheep pain. If you say sheep pain quickly, it sounds like
shpain, close to the sound of Spain.

New words

The Wind Talkers developed more than six hundred terms to describe
different things, but they were not enough. Sometimes they had to spell the
name of a special place or a person. But if they used one group of words for
the letters, the enemy might start to understand the cipher, so for most
letters the Navajo Wind Talkers used three different Navajo words,
changing them often. For example, the letter H was ciphered as tse-gah
(hair), cha (hat) or lin (horse). Of course it was necessary to keep
everything secret, so no written copies of the code were allowed outside the
training camps. The Navajo Wind Talkers had to remember everything.

To test the new code and cipher, the army found Navajo speakers who
did not work for the army. These other speakers of the Navajo language
could not guess the meaning of the coded and ciphered messages. This
meant that the test was a success.

By 1945, more than four hundred Navajo Wind Talkers were sending
thousands of messages. Most importantly, the Navajo Wind Talker code
was never broken and the Navajo Wind Talkers helped the United States to
win World War 2.

For women only!

For about 1,700 years, girls and women in Pumei Village, in southern
China, used a secret language that was never shared with men or boys. The
name of the language is Nashu. Today, only about ten people know how to
speak it.
 Boys and men learned to read and write Chinese but girls did not
learn; until recently, they did not go to school at all. Instead, girls in Pumei
Village taught themselves to read and write their own secret language.

Nashu started as a way for young girls and women to make friends
and share secrets. The written form of Nashu is quite different from written
Chinese. Some of the symbols look like Chinese symbols, but each one is a
letter, not a word, so it is easier to learn.

Older women first taught younger girls Nashu by singing songs in the
secret language and then talking and telling stories in it. Girls were then
taught how to write the language. Often, they did not have paper to write
on. They wrote on their hands to practice. Sometimes they wrote a message
on a handkerchief as a gift to another woman.

When a girl married, she left her friends and went to live with her
husband. The third day after she was married, friends gave her a special
book. The first few pages of the book were written in Nashu by female
friends and relatives. The rest of the pages of the book were empty pages
for the young woman to write a diary in Nashu. Chinese girls now learn to
read and write in school and do not need to read and write in a secret
language. Nashu is a dying language.
 CHAPTER TEN

Talking with Your Body

Hand signals are important when people cannot hear each other or do
not want to be heard.

Can you recognise whether a stranger is happy or unhappy? There is

one secret language that everyone speaks but not everyone understands:
body language. Body language is all the communication in a conversation
except the actual words you use. There are two different kinds of body
language: body language that we can control and body language that we
cannot control.

Uncontrolled body language

We are born with body language that we cannot control. It shows how
we feel.

For example, blind children do not learn to smile by seeing someone

else smile. Although they never see anyone smile, they still do it. All
humans smile. In the same way, deaf children laugh, although they never
hear anyone else laughing.

It is easiest to read the body language of children. When they are

tired, sad or happy, their bodies show it immediately. As children get older,
they try to control their body language. Adults control theirs for many
reasons. They may not want other people to think they are afraid when they
speak in front of a group. They may not want to show that they are bored
because they want to be polite. But people cannot always control
themselves.

The human body has many ways to give messages about how we feel.
Many of these messages come from emotions like love, anger and jealousy.
Often, our body's messages are not the same as the ones we give through
our speech. We may give a polite yes' while showing with a shake of our
head and crossed arms our true feelings: 'no'.

These messages teach us a lot about what people really mean.

Sometimes, they also help us understand when other people are lying,
because their words do not match their body language. But body language
is different all around the world. How many of the kinds of body language
shown on the next page do you use?

Do they have the same meaning?

Body language you control

The second kind of body language is the kind we can control. We may
smile when we are happy, but a smile can also give other kinds of
messages. It may show that we believe something, or that we agree. It may
let someone know that they are doing a good job. And we use many
different kinds of smile to greet someone or to call attention to ourselves in
a shop or restaurant.

But people do not just smile with their lips; we use our whole face to
show real pleasure. The lines around our eyes move too. People sometimes
smile with their lips but not with their eyes when they are just being polite.

People use body language to give many kinds of orders. A police

officer uses body language to give directions to traffic. Sports teams use
body language to tell team members how to play. They can use hand signals
that the other team cannot understand.

In Hong Kong, jewellery traders discuss the price of special jewels or

stones by putting their hands under a newspaper or blanket. They pull on
each others fingers to agree a price and use code words to say if the price is
in the hundreds or thousands.
 Hand signals are important when people cannot hear each other or do
not want to be heard. Police and soldiers use hand signals to give secret
commands. Small radios have made some of these signals less important,
but one group of people still uses hand signals every day: the deaf.

American sign language

Martha's Vineyard is an island on the east coast of the United States.

For almost two hundred years there was a small population on the island
and people often married within the same families. But many of these
people had a medical problem that made them and their children deaf. By
the late 1800s there were twenty times as many deaf people on Martha's
Vineyard as in most other places in the world.

These deaf people had no problem communicating. They developed

their own sign language for everyday use and most people on Martha's
Vineyard used it. Even hearing people used it to communicate with other
hearing people. Children learnt it to communicate behind their teachers'
backs in class.

In 1817, after learning sign language in France, a group of teachers

opened a school for the deaf in Hartford, Connecticut in the United States.
Many deaf students from Martha's Vineyard went there to learn, but they
also took their own sign language with them. The two languages mixed and
the new language was soon called American Sign Language.

American sign language has two parts: body language symbols, which
are like a code, and alphabet symbols that are like a cipher. Some signs are
easy to understand, like pointing to yourself with the first finger of your
right hand to show I, or using your open right hand to show my. Some other
signs are easy to understand when they are explained; the use of your right
hand to brush pretend snow off your left shoulder means Canadian. Other
signs just need to be memorized.

But although American Sign Language is used everywhere in North

America, people in other English-speaking countries like Britain do not
understand it. They use their own signs. There is no international sign
language.

Children and animals

At what age can someone start to learn sign language? Babies cannot
talk before a certain age - their mouths, throats and tongues are not ready.
But in the 1980s, a university student noticed his deaf friends
communicating with their babies in sign. The man found that these babies
learn to communicate with their parents much earlier than hearing children.
They use simple hand signs for things that they wanted to have or do.

The man's own child was not deaf, but he tried it. He found that the
baby could quickly learn to make simple signs. Now many people use sign
language with their hearing babies. The signs are for things like hat, toy,
milk, sleep and food.

Animals cannot talk for the same reason that babies cannot. Their
mouths, throats and tongues are not the right shapes. Also, many animals do
not have lips. Scientists wondered if animals could learn to use signs to
explain what they wanted. There have been many tests. Some scientists say
the tests prove animals can learn to speak in signs. But other people
disagree and say the scientists have not proved anything.

Secret handshakes

The Masons, also called the Freemasons, are part of a large

international group of men who like to share secrets, help each other and
help others. The Masons is an old organisation. It started around the 1700s
and perhaps as early as four hundred years earlier. Masons give themselves
special names and greet each other with secret signals and handshakes.
 CHAPTER ELEVEN

Lost Words

He decided to discover the meaning of hieroglyphics and spent the

next eighteen years studying them.

All languages are secret codes for people who cannot understand
them. In most cases, it is easy to learn other languages; there is no reason
for them to be secret at all. You can go to the library or take classes or visit
another country and learn. But some languages are simply lost. The
speakers and writers of those languages have all died and there is no record
of how the languages sounded or what the writings mean.

Egyptian hieroglyphics

One of the oldest and most famous of these languages is Egyptian

hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphics is an unusual kind of writing. It includes 6,000
different symbols. Some symbols are quite simple: a picture of a knife
means knife or cut. Some are detailed pictures of gods, people and animals.
But for 1,400 years, no one could begin to guess how to read these strange
symbols or even what they sounded like.

After 1798, this situation changed. The French leader Napoleon

Bonaparte took his army to Egypt. He also took 167 scientists with him.
The scientists wanted to study Egypt's art and old buildings and to try to
understand Egypt's past and its language.

Later that year, soldiers found a large piece of black stone near the
Egyptian town of Rosetta. The 762-kilogram stone was part of a building
that the soldiers were taking down. On the stone was a message in three
languages, including hieroglyphics. The scientists quickly decided that the
stone was the clue they were looking for. If they could understand one of
the languages, they might be able to understand hieroglyphics.

One of the languages was easy to understand. It was old Greek.

Scientists soon understood the message. It written in 196 BC and talked
about the new leader of Egypt, a thirteen year-old boy named Ptolemy V
Epiphanes. The other language was Demotic. Demotic is old Egyptian
writing that is simpler to read and write than hieroglyphics. But it was still
not understood.

The French scientists made paper copies of the Rosetta Stone's

writings and sent them to other scientists in Europe. But many years passed
before anyone could understand how to read hieroglyphics. The answer did
not come from a famous scientist; a young Frenchman, Jean Francois
Champollion, discovered the secret.

As a young boy, Champollion was very interested in languages. He

learned Arabic, Chinese, Chaldean, Hebrew and Syriac. He later learned
Coptic, Ethiopie, Sanskrit, Zend, Pahlevi and Persian. All these languages
helped him to understand how a lost language like Egyptian hieroglyphics
might work.

One day, a famous scientist came to his school. The scientist had
visited Egypt and Champollion had learned everything he could about
Egypt. He had many questions for the scientist. Finally, the scientist
laughed: 'Who went to Egypt? You or me?' The scientist thought that
Champollion was a great student and later helped him study at a better
school.

When Champollion was eighteen years old, he saw a copy of the

Rosetta Stone. He decided to discover the meaning of hieroglyphics and
spent the next eighteen years studying them. People had different ideas
about what hieroglyphics might mean. Some people thought each symbol
was a different word. Some people thought that the symbols were only
pretty pictures decorations. Some thought that the different symbols were
letters of an Egyptian alphabet.
 Another problem was the direction of the sentences. The sentences
sometime went from left to right and sometimes from right to left, but there
was one clue the animal heads always faced the start of each sentence.

Champollion knew that written Hebrew and Arabic texts do not

include the a, e, i, o or u sounds. Sometimes they are also not included in
written English.

For example, we write the short form Rd for road. But it would be
confusing if we shortened every word in this way. Two letters like bt could
represent a number of words, including beat, boat and boot.

Champollion decided that hieroglyphics worked the same way but

that they used a symbol at the start of the sentence to explain what it was
about. For example, if the bt word was boat, the first symbol might be about
water.

Champollion thought about these different ideas and looked at more

and more examples of hieroglyphics. He found that sometimes symbols
were in a little box. Champollion guessed that these symbols might stand
for the name of a king or queen.

Champollion found characters in the boxes that represented the

sounds for RMSS and KLPDR. When he guessed the other letters, he had
the names of an Egyptian king and queen: Ramses and Kliopadra
(Cleopatra). This told Champollion that Egyptian hieroglyphics were made
up of sounds, and were not just pictures of ideas.

Champollion jumped up from his desk and ran across town to see his
brother. 'I have done it!' he shouted. Then he fell down and did not get out
of bed for eight days. The lost language of the Egyptians could finally be
read and heard again.

Cuneiform
 Cuneiform was another language that was lost for thousands of years.
It was first used more than 5,000 years ago and was popular for about 3,000
years. It was used by the people who lived in the area around modern Iraq.
These people did not use paper to write on. Instead, they used clay. If the
message was not important, the clay could be put in water and used again.
If the message was important, the clay could be baked hard. Then it lasted
for centuries.

Often, clay messages were baked by accident. When an enemy army

attacked, it often burned down a city. The clay messages in the houses and
buildings were baked in the fires.

After that, the messages might be buried in the desert sands for
hundreds or thousands of years.

Cuneiform was written with a small pointed stick. A writer quickly

made small marks in the wet clay. Like Egyptian hieroglyphics, cuneiform
began as pictures of things that people wanted to buy and sell. The first
pictures were of animals and food. A trader drew a picture of a cow on one
clay disk and used it like money. If there were five cows, he made five clay
disks. Later, cuneiform writers developed numbers. Instead of five disks for
cows, the trader could use one disk for cows and one disk with the number
five on it. Eventually, traders made one disk with the number five and a
cow on it and the disks became coins.

These pictures became simpler as people had to write them faster. In

time it became very hard to recognise the old pictures.

Although it was an important language for 3,000 years, cuneiform

became a lost language that no one could read. Then, in 1833, a British
soldier, Henry Rawlinson, found some writing on a rock at Behistun in
Persia (now in Iraq).

The writing had been cut into the stone during the time of King
Darius I. He was the king of Persia from 522 to 486 BC. Like the Rosetta
Stone, the same texts were written in three languages: Old Persian,
Babylonian cuneiform and Elamite.
 Rawlinson spoke Persian and was able to translate the least difficult
text - old Persian - first. It told the story of King Darius. After that,
Rawlinson began the hard work of deciphering the cuneiform. By 1851, he
could read two hundred cuneiform signs. Cuneiform is no longer a lost
language and we can understand a lot about daily life 2,500 years ago.
 CHAPTER TWELVE

Human Nature

In the history of secret codes and ciphers, people have often missed
finding clues or solving problems for personal reasons.

Ciphers and codes are only as good as the people who use them. They
have been broken because people have been careless or because spies have
been clever. Mata Hari was a Dutch spy who worked for the Germans
during World War 1. But she made a mistake and sent information to them
using an old cipher. The French were able to understand the message, so the
Germans were angry and punished her. They sent her a message in another
cipher that they knew the French could read. The message gave away Mata
Haris name. The French government found and shot her.

Stealing secrets

Thieves find it easy to steal information from peoples computers or

banks because people are less careful about their secret codes than they are
about the locks on their doors. For example, many people write down their
code words and keep them in their wallets or on their desks.

In other cases, thieves use 'social engineering'; they use people's

foolishness and fears to get the secrets they want. For example, a thief may
telephone you and say there is a problem with your computer or bank. If
you agree to give them your secret word or other information, you can lose
a lot of money quickly and easily. Thieves even go through people's rubbish
to look for letters from banks or information about bank cards. People are
now more careful with information about their secret codes and bank
information, but thieves still find new ways to steal what they want.
 Mistakes

In the history of secret codes and ciphers, people have often missed
finding clues or solving problems for personal reasons. In the 1920s, the
Americans learned about Japanese codes by breaking into their government
office in New York and photographing their codebook. During World War
2, Germans used the effective Enigma cipher to keep their secrets, but they
shared their plans with Japanese officials and politicians who then talked
about the German plans. Because the British and Americans could break the
less difficult Japanese codes and ciphers, they had a better idea of what the
Germans were doing.

Human nature means that people make mistakes for many reasons - or
they may be punished for their success. Joseph J Rochefort was the World
War 2 cipher breaker who thought the Japanese were going to attack
Midway Island. His boss thought that they were going to attack Alaska.
Rochefort was right and found a way to prove it by sending a false message.
But his boss was jealous and Rochefort never worked in codes and ciphers
again.

The Mayan Glyphs

In the I6h and 17h centuries, Spanish soldiers went to the 'New World'
for gold. They found it in the area of Mexico and Central America. They
took guns, alcohol, the Christian religion and disease with them. The
Mayan people tried to fight against the Spanish, but they were not strong
enough.

The Spanish found a rich society. Mayans had built great cities and
developed a written language around 100 BC. These cities lasted until the
Spanish arrived. The Mayan people had beautiful art and great writings
which told their history and their stories. They also had beautiful writing -
among the most beautiful in the world. But it was almost completely lost.

Other languages, like Egyptian hieroglyphics, were lost because

people just stopped using them. But Mayan glyphs were lost because the
Spanish did not like them. One man especially wanted to get rid of them: a
religious leader called Diego de Landa.

De Landa hated Mayan glyphs. He wanted to bring the Christian

religion to the people of the Americas. He did not understand the glyphs
and thought that their pictures of Mayan gods would stop the Mayan people
from accepting Christianity. He ordered the Spanish soldiers to destroy all
Mayan books and pictures. No one knows how many books were burned,
but we do know that only three are left today.

Mayan writing has hundreds of different signs, or glyphs, in the form

of humans, animals, gods and everyday tools.

De Landa destroyed much of Mayan language and art, but he also

helped to save it. In 1566, he wrote a book about his time in Latin America
and thought he should say something about the language. He decided to ask
some of the Mayan people to write down their alphabet.

In fact, the Mayans did not have an alphabet. They simply wrote the
pictures that they used for each of the sounds that he said. If someone asked
you for the picture for the English letter c, you might misunderstand and
draw a sea.

Slowly, the Mayan language was lost. But fortunately, it was not just
kept in books. The Mayan people left their writing on stone buildings.
Many foreigners knew that there were lost cities in Central America and
two travellers, John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, visited
some of them in 1839. Catherwood made drawings and paintings of the
ruins they found and people became very interested in Mayan writing. In
the 1920s, John Eric Thompson collected and organized thousands of
Mayan symbols.

Thompson was a specialist in the Mayan symbols, but he had his own
ideas about what they meant. He fought with anyone who disagreed. Some
people think that his ideas slowed learning about Mayan writing for forty
years. The Russian scientist Yuri Knorosov finally found a way to read the
Mayan texts using de Lauda's alphabet writing. For a long time, Thompson
and the Americans did not believe him simply because they did not like
Russians.

The largest codes

Is there intelligent life in other worlds? Are there living beings like
people or are they completely different? If they are, what are they like?
What will they say to us? These are questions that scientists have tried to
answer for more than forty years.

In 1959, two scientists at Cornell University explained how radio

waves could be sent between the stars. This made people think. Were there
scientific societies in other worlds sending radio messages?

In 1960, a scientist called Frank Drake used a radio telescope to listen

for signs from another world. He listened for several weeks. He did not find
anything, but others were interested in the idea. More and more scientists
began looking for life among the stars. One group uses people's home
computers to help examine information collected by radio telescopes. When
you are not working on your computer, a program can use it to look for
signals that could be messages.

Other scientists send out messages for people from other worlds to
hear.

What do scientists expect to find? People from another world are not
likely to speak English or any other known language. They may send out
radio waves. If the signals are regular and repeated, we will know that
someone from another world is trying to communicate.

In addition to radio wave signals, scientists on Earth have tried to

send another kind of code on a space ship.

The Voyager space ship message is on a thirty-centimeter metal disk.

The disk contains sounds and pictures that show different kinds of life on
Earth. There are 115 pictures and many sounds from nature.
 These include sounds of the ocean, different kinds of weather, birds
and other animals. There is music from different countries and from
different times through history. There are also greetings in fifty-five
languages. Some of the languages are 6,000 years old. But you should not
expect to hear from another world too soon. It will take 40,000 years for
Voyager to get close to another world that might contain life.

By then, perhaps no one will remember the message that we sent or

the languages that we now speak. Will we use our intelligence to fight wars
or make friends? The important question is whether human nature will
make people want to keep secrets or share ideas.

The history of secret codes and ciphers shows how clever people can
be - at making secret codes and ciphers and at breaking them. It is unlikely
that anyone will ever develop the perfect secret code or cipher that no one
can break. It may take a long time and be very difficult, but it will be
broken. Everyone loves to know a secret.

- THE END -

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