“Unsolvable” Code Broken

The title page of the 1892 weather code book that helped translate the notes. Sean Jones, NOAA Central Library

Ten years ago, archaeologist and antique dress collector Sara Rivers Cofield found two pieces of paper in a hidden pocket of a dress dating to the mid-1880s. The pages held strings of unrelated words:  “Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank.” and  “Calgary, Cuba, unguard, confute, duck, fagan.” 

A decade later a Canadian computer analyst has broken the code and found that the words contained coded weather reports to send via telegraph in the late 19th century.

Read more: Smithsonian Magazine