Charles Babbage and deciphering codes (1864)

Summary

Charles Babbage and deciphering codes Charles Babbage wrote an autobiography Passages from the Life of a Philosopher which was published in London in 1864. In our biography of Babbage we have quoted several passages from the book which tell us about his life and the analytical engine. Here we quote from Chapter XVIII of the book where Babbage writes about deciphering. What we present here is only an extract. In fact we omit a more technical part which describes the considerable effort that he had put in constructing dictionaries with particular properties to assist in deciphering:- Deciphering is, in my opinion, one of the most fascinating of arts, and I fear I have wasted upon it more time than it deserves. I practised it in its simplest form when I was at school. The bigger boys made ciphers, but if I got hold of a few words, I usually found out the key. The consequence of this ingenuity was occasionally painful: the owners of the detected ciphers sometimes thrashed me, though the fault really lay in their own stupidity. There is a kind of maxim amongst the craft of decipherers ..., that every cipher can be deciphered. I am myself inclined to think that deciphering is an affair of time, ingenuity, and patience; and that very few ciphers are worth the trouble of unravelling them. One of the most singular characteristics of the art of deciphering is the strong conviction possessed by every person, even moderately acquainted with it, that he is able to construct a cipher which nobody else can decipher. I have also observed that the cleverer the person, the more intimate is his conviction. In my earliest study of the subject I shared in this belief, and maintained it for many years. In a conversation on that subject which I had with the late Mr Davies Gilbert, President of the Royal Society, each maintained that he possessed a cipher which was absolutely inscrutable. On comparison, it appeared that we had both imagined the same law, and we were thus confirmed in our c...