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Mysterious messages found in the pocket of an antique dress have finally been decoded, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Ten years ago, archaeologist and antique dress collector Sara Rivers Cofield found two crumpled pieces of paper tucked into a hidden pocket of a dress dating to the mid-1880s. Scrawled on the pages were nonsensical strings of text: One line, for example, read “Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank,” while another read “Calgary, Cuba, unguard, confute, duck, fagan.”
:focal(638x358:639x359)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/3c/60/3c602d69-cde1-4192-998c-bde269a0fa50/dress_pics.jpg)
The silk dress, which dates to the mid-1880s, in which the pieces of paper containing the code were found. They were tucked in a hidden pocket, the opening of which was hidden by an overskirt. Sara Rivers Cofield via NOAA
Rivers Cofield posted about the dress and its surprising contents on her blog in February 2014. The unintelligible words gained notoriety and soon became considered among the fifty most “unsolvable”codes in the world, per NOAA.
But last year, that changed. Wayne Chan, a research computer analyst at the University of Manitoba in Canada, determined the code words would have been used to transmit local weather via telegraph.
In those days, telegraph messages containing lots of information had to be condensed in order to save money. Chan explained in a 2023 paper in the journal Cryptologia that telegraph companies charged by the word—so encoding messages could effectively cut down their price.
The line beginning with Bismark, for example, seems to encode the weather in present-day Bismarck, North Dakota, on May 27, 1888, at 10 p.m. The short list of five words has wide-reaching weather data—air temperature, barometric pressure, dew point, precipitation, wind direction, cloud conditions, wind velocity and sunset observations—all baked into it.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smar...ue-dress-pocket-is-finally-cracked-180983550/
maximus otter
Ten years ago, archaeologist and antique dress collector Sara Rivers Cofield found two crumpled pieces of paper tucked into a hidden pocket of a dress dating to the mid-1880s. Scrawled on the pages were nonsensical strings of text: One line, for example, read “Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank,” while another read “Calgary, Cuba, unguard, confute, duck, fagan.”
The silk dress, which dates to the mid-1880s, in which the pieces of paper containing the code were found. They were tucked in a hidden pocket, the opening of which was hidden by an overskirt. Sara Rivers Cofield via NOAA
Rivers Cofield posted about the dress and its surprising contents on her blog in February 2014. The unintelligible words gained notoriety and soon became considered among the fifty most “unsolvable”codes in the world, per NOAA.
But last year, that changed. Wayne Chan, a research computer analyst at the University of Manitoba in Canada, determined the code words would have been used to transmit local weather via telegraph.
In those days, telegraph messages containing lots of information had to be condensed in order to save money. Chan explained in a 2023 paper in the journal Cryptologia that telegraph companies charged by the word—so encoding messages could effectively cut down their price.
The line beginning with Bismark, for example, seems to encode the weather in present-day Bismarck, North Dakota, on May 27, 1888, at 10 p.m. The short list of five words has wide-reaching weather data—air temperature, barometric pressure, dew point, precipitation, wind direction, cloud conditions, wind velocity and sunset observations—all baked into it.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smar...ue-dress-pocket-is-finally-cracked-180983550/
maximus otter
