A little history

A little history…

October 25, 2020

  Once upon a time, there was a man named Leon Battista Alberti who really was the definition of the a renaissance man. His curiosity and insatiable need to keep moving kept him writing plays, publishing multiple treatises (yeah, that doesn’t look right, but I’m pretty sure it is), and designing buildings. In his spare time, he invented things and procured the moniker “Father of Western Cryptography”. Pretty impressive, yes?

So how did the Father of Western Cryptography advance the field of codes? First, he figured out how to break ciphers without the key, he invented the polyalphabetic cipher and he encrypted his codes. Now, when we say “code” most people think computer language, but obviously, those weren’t around then. Let’s switch out “codes” for cryptology, and go from there. Cryptology is the “practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties”. “(Thanks, Wiki!) At this point, everyone has probably used some form of Cryptology, from the awkward and slightly cringy one found in Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Greg gets himself kicked out of Rowley’s house for insulting Rowley’s dad) to the decoder ring encouraging Ralph to drink his Ovaltine in A Christmas Story.

Ralph’s decoder ring is a few generations away from the polyalphabetic cipher, a longer name for a basic substitute alphabets, but the premise is the same. Polyalphabetic ciphers generally have one paper or stone with the alphabet in the center that rotates, connected to another stable paper or stone. Messages can be sent by deciding what letter “A” equals, and then writing the information using the second layer of letters; deciphering the code requires the receiver have the same cipher. As there are 26 letters in the alphabet, making sure the sender and receiver have a match is important.

From the kid sending a note in class, in the before times, when class was a thing (Ask your parents. Class was a thing and sending notes was a thing!) to generals disseminating information, codes have been around for a while.