The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

  Elizebeth Smith wasn’t involved in the suffrage movement or any other. Her views on women’s rights at age twenty-three were complicated. She idolized the suffrage pioneers but doubted that men would give up their power without a vicious fight. Earlier that year she had found herself riding a crowded bus when a heavyset woman looked straight at her and then used her rump to shove her out of the way. Elizebeth fumed in her diary, “No woman’s rights was adequate to the situation then! I wanted genuine masculine title; if I had been a man she’d never have dared do it.”

  There in the city, she reviewed her options. Should she take the job that George Fabyan had offered, or go back home to Indiana? She couldn’t decide. Fabyan scared her. But she had wanted an unusual job, and in all her life she had never seen a place so unusual as Fabyan’s estate.

  She was running out of clean clothes in her suitcase. She was out of time.

  Elizebeth made her way to the Chicago & North Western train station. At the ticket counter she asked, in her firm, polite voice, for a fare to Geneva, Illinois.

  When she arrived once again at Riverbank, Fabyan and Mrs. Gallup were glad to see her. They wasted no time, and began teaching her how to dive for what Francis Bacon had left behind: a sunken treasure of words, a ship of gold at the bottom of the sea.

  CHAPTER 3

  Bacon’s Ghost

  The Bacon-Shakespeare investigators at Riverbank, 1916.

  Mrs. Gallup is seated in the front row on the left, and Elizebeth Smith is third from the left standing in the middle row.

  (George C. Marshall Research Foundation)

  Mrs. Gallup had to know if her new assistant, this Elizebeth Smith, could be trained to see. So this is where they began—with a deciphering test.

  In the Lodge, Mrs. Gallup placed several pages in front of Elizebeth. One was a worksheet of white paper with some typing on it, eight lines of text from the Shakespeare Folio. The text was broken into five-letter blocks:

  TheWo rkeso fWill iamSh akesp earec ontai ninga llhis Comed iesHi stori esand Trage diesT ruely setfo . . .

  When Elizebeth read the text and skipped over the spaces, she could make sense of it as English:

  The workes of William Shakespeare containing all his Comedies Histories and Tragedies Truely set . . .

  She recognized these words from one of the early pages of the First Folio, “The Names of the Principall Actors.”

  According to Mrs. Gallup, Francis Bacon had concealed a message on this page. She already knew the secret, but needed to know if Elizebeth could find it, too.

  Mrs. Gallup always said that as a devout Christian she was appalled when she first discovered the secret messages of Francis Bacon. She did not traffic in such matters as Bacon discussed: deception, blackmail, adultery, the insatiable lusts of queens and earls. “Surprise followed surprise,” Mrs. Gallup wrote, “as the hidden messages were disclosed, and disappointment as well was not infrequently encountered. Some of the disclosures are of a nature repugnant, in many respects, to my very soul.” However, her own moral beliefs were irrelevant. “The sole question is—what are the facts? These cannot be determined by slight and imperfect examinations, preconceived ideas, abstract contemplation, or vigor of denunciation.”

  She was not the first person who claimed that Shakespeare was really Francis Bacon in disguise. This idea, known as the “Baconian” theory, enjoyed broad appeal and made a certain sense. Francis Bacon and Shakespeare had lived in the same country in the same era, the England of Queen Elizabeth I, and of the two men, Bacon was by far the more distinguished, a child prodigy who graduated from Trinity College at age fifteen, studied law, served in Parliament, became lord chancellor, won the lofty titles of Baron Verulam and Viscount St. Albans, and wrote manifestoes that heralded the dawn of the scientific age and inspired generations of inventors and revolutionaries. Charles Darwin idolized Francis Bacon; Thomas Jefferson thought Bacon was among the two or three greatest men who ever lived; Teddy Roosevelt’s love of Bacon’s writings encouraged him to create America’s system of national parks.

  The radical idea that made Bacon a legend is one of the epigraphs of this book: “Knowledge itself is power” (his admirers often shortened it to “knowledge is power”). What people called science in Bacon’s day was more like philosophy or logic: the thinking of beautiful thoughts. Bacon said no, science is about physical evidence. Knowledge is found not in the skull but in contact with Nature. And Bacon made it his mission to collect and classify all forms of knowledge, arguing that if enough knowledge was gathered and sorted and pinned to the page, there was nothing men could not achieve. In an unfinished utopian novel, The New Atlantis, Bacon imagined a lush, remote island ruled by superintelligent scientists. The people spend their days studying the native beasts and plants, running experiments in towers, caves, artificial lakes, and specially constructed laboratories. The island is a like a cross between a research university and a nature preserve, a place devoted to the investigation of light, acoustics, perfumes, engines, furnaces, mammals, fishes, flowers, seeds, geometry, illusions, deceptions, and, above all, methods of extending human life, of achieving immortality. He thought humans might learn to live forever, be immortal, become like gods.

  All in all, Bacon was such an impressive person that it seemed perfectly plausible to writers and scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that Bacon might have written Shakespeare’s plays under a pseudonym. Mark Twain believed it. So did Nathaniel Hawthorne. Was there proof? Had Bacon left a hidden signature? Men and women romped through the grassy fields of the texts and scraped at the individual letters with every kind of tool imaginable. Anagrams: whereby existing letters are rearranged to create new words and phrases. (The phrase “Maister William Shakespeare” in the 1623 Folio can be anagrammed into “I maske as a writer I spelle Ham.”) Numerology: whereby letters are converted into numbers that seem significant. (If A=1 and B=2, the name “Bacon” is 2+1+3+14+13, equaling 33; the appearance of 33 in any count of Shakespeare’s words is a signature of Bacon.) One man, Orville Ward Owen, a physician from Detroit, invented a machine he called a “wheel,” two large wooden spools stretched with one thousand feet of canvas on which he had printed thousands of pages of different Elizabethan texts. Dr. Owen and his team of assistants would spin the wheel, look for instances of four “code words” they believed were important (FORTUNE, HONOUR, NATURE, and REPUTATION), write down words that appeared next to those four words, and arrange them into sentences.

  What made Mrs. Gallup different from these other investigators was that she presented herself first and foremost as a scientist, and her system for finding the messages was the most scientific and plausible yet. It wasn’t something that came to her in a dream. The method had been demonstrated by Francis Bacon himself, in his book De Augmentis Scientarium, published the same year as Shakespeare’s First Folio, 1623.

  Bacon revealed that year that he had invented a new type of cipher, a method to signify “omnia per omnia”: anything by means of anything. It possessed what he said were the three virtues of a good cipher: it was “easy and not laborious to write,” it was “safe,” and it did not raise suspicion—that is, an enciphered message would not appear, at first glance, to be in cipher at all. These are still sound principles today. His insight was that all letters of the alphabet can be represented with only two letters, if the two letters are combined in different permutations of five-letter blocks. The letters i and j, and u and v, were interchangeable in Bacon’s time, so, choosing a and b for the two letters that represent all the rest, the new alphabet looks like this:

  A

  B

  C

  D

  E

  F

  aaaaa

  aaaab

  aaaba

  aaabb

  aabaa

  aabab

  G

  H

  I, J

  K

  L

  M

  aabba

 
aabbb

  abaaa

  abaab

  ababa

  ababb

  N

  O

  P

  Q

  R

  S

  abbaa

  abbab

  abbba

  abbbb

  baaaa

  baaab

  T

  U, V

  W

  X

  Y

  Z

  baaba

  baabb

  babaa

  babab

  babba

  babbb

  Each letter becomes five, so a word like Riverbank, written in this cipher, grows five times as long: baaaa abaaa baabb aabaa baaaa aaaab aaaaa abbaa abaab.

  This is exactly like binary code, the language at the root of computers, and Morse code as well. In all of these systems, just two symbols, arranged in different combinations, can stand for many others. Binary code uses 0s and 1s, Morse code dots and dashes. Francis Bacon discovered the basic principle in 1623.

  Crucially to Mrs. Gallup, he also showed the flexibility and power of his cipher by example. Bacon pointed out that the two letters that represent the others in his cipher don’t have to be a and b. They can be c and d, or x and y. They can be physical objects, like apples and oranges arranged on a table; they can be sounds, like the alternating and audibly distinct shots of a musket and a cannon. In Bacon’s cipher, the plaintext for is “deaf.” means “die.” All that’s required is a “biliteral alphabet,” an alphabet made of any two forms that are recognizably different. Write a manifesto with candies, send a love letter with bullets. As long as you specify an a-form and b-form, you can make anything stand for anything else. Omnia per omnia.

  You can even camouflage a secret message in plain sight.

  A message that reads aaaba abbab aaabb aabaa is obviously written in cipher, and anyone who intercepts it will know it contains a secret. Bacon suggested creating a “bi-formed alphabet” to overcome this problem—an alphabet with two slightly different versions of each letter, an a-form and a b-form. For example, an italic letter might be the a-form, and a normal, “roman” letter the b-form. A string of text like

  knowledge is power

  might translate to

  run

  This was the heart of Mrs. Gallup’s method. She scoured photo enlargements of pages from Shakespeare’s First Folio and other Elizabethan books, looking for minute differences in the shapes of letterforms to discover the “biformed alphabet” she believed Bacon had planted in the text—the two alphabets with letters of different shapes. Then she drew charts of the a-form letters and the b-form letters. Then she went back through the original texts of the old books and compared each letter to the drawings of the letters on her charts, deciding if a letter was an a-form or a b-form. After classifying five letters in this manner, she was able to check Bacon’s key (aaaaa=A, aaaab=B, aaaba=C) and write one letter of the final message. And that was when she found the secrets that troubled her Christian conscience.

  Queene Elizabeth is my true mother and I am the lawfull heire to the throne. Finde the cypher storie my bookes containe. It tells great secrets, every one of which, if imparted openly, would forfeit my life. —F. Bacon.

  Francis of Verulam is author of all the plays heretofore published by Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Shakespeare, and of the two and twenty now put out for the first time. Some are alter’d to continue this history.

  Francis St. Alban, descended from the mighty heroes of Troy, loving and revering these noble ancestors, hid in his writings Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (in cipher), with the Aeneid of the noble Virgil, prince of Latin poets, inscribing the letters to Elizabeth. . . . He in this way, and in his Cypher workes, gives full directions, in a great many places, for finding and unfolding of severall weightie secrets, hidden from those who would persecute the betrayer.

  You will either finde the guides or be lost in the labyrinth.

  —Fr. St. Alban.

  First published in her 1899 book The Biliteral Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon Discovered in His Works and Deciphered by Mrs. Elizabeth Wells Gallup, the messages told an alternate history of Elizabethan England that riveted journalists and divided scholars. According to Mrs. Gallup’s decipherments, Francis Bacon wasn’t just the great genius of his age. He was a secret king: the bastard son of Queen Elizabeth, known for her indiscretions, and the Earl of Leicester. During his own lifetime, Bacon was afraid that if he claimed his royal blood, he would be killed to suppress a scandal, so he had found a way to smuggle the truth into history, using his cipher to conceal messages in “great dramaticall works” he wrote under pseudonyms (Shakespeare, Marlowe) and also in “workes of science” published under his own name. He conspired with printers to sneak the cipher into books without anyone catching on, and he taught the cipher to a clandestine society of engineers, the Rosicrucian Society of England, who conducted scientific experiments in secret, fearing accusations of witchcraft. Using the cipher, Bacon and the Rosicrucians were able to exchange dangerous knowledge without fear of discovery and design technologically advanced machines.

  Her work unleashed a furor. Mrs. Gallup seemed to come out of nowhere with an impressive scientific procedure and reams of proof. “Here are 360 pages of deciphered matter,” one journalist wrote in a typical review, “with sufficient means of proof to satisfy any investigator.” Skeptics questioned the veracity of the messages and said Mrs. Gallup must be imagining them; she savaged her critics in icy pamphlets and letters to the editor, writing that her style of analysis was “impossible to those who are not possessed of an eyesight of the keenest and most perfect accuracy of vision in distinguishing minute differences in form, lines, angles and curves in the printed letters. Other things absolutely essential are unlimited time and patience, and aptitude, love for overcoming puzzling difficulties, and, I sometimes think inspiration.” She argued that if other people could not replicate her findings, it was their own fault—they had poor eyesight, they were lazy, they were uninspired.

  She traveled to Oxford, England, and won converts in the literary community there. She produced testimony from researchers in England and America who swore that they had been able to replicate her decipherments: Mrs. Gertrude Horsford Fiske, Mrs. Henry Pott, Mr. Henry Seymour, Mrs. D. J. Kindersley, Mr. James Phinney Baxter. And of all her supporters, no one had more faith than George Fabyan. He invited Mrs. Gallup and her sister to Riverbank in 1912 and gave them carte blanche to pursue their investigation to its ultimate end. There was nothing he would not buy or build to support her work, no mode of investigation too outlandish or expensive. After establishing herself at Riverbank, Mrs. Gallup reported that she had deciphered a message from Bacon describing an “acoustical levitation device,” an antigravity machine he apparently invented in the seventeenth century. It used the vibrations of musical strings to lift a rapidly rotating cylinder off the ground. Fabyan ordered his chief engineer, Bert Eisenhour, to build the machine out of wood. The result looked like a water wheel. Eisenhour couldn’t get it to work. Something about the tuning of the strings. Fabyan was undaunted, saying, “The inheritance which the world received from Mrs. Gallup’s work is the greatest that has ever been given to posterity.”

  He wrote that in 1916, the same year Elizebeth Smith arrived at Riverbank and was handed her first deciphering test by Mrs. Gallup.

  Elizebeth looked at the test worksheet:

  TheWo rkeso fWill iamSh akesp earec ontai ninga llhis Comed iesHi stori esand Trage diesT ruely setfo . . .

  Along with the typed worksheet, Mrs. Gallup had provided a photo enlargement of the actual page from the First Folio on which these words appeared. There was a copy of the biformed alphabet that Mrs. Gallup had already extracted from this part of the Folio—a list of all the a- and b-forms apparently inserted by Bacon. Mrs. Gallup also gave Elizebeth a looking glass of her own, and the key to the biliteral cipher: aaaaa means A, aaaab means B, and so on. To find the secret message,
Elizebeth would need to squint at the Folio page through the glass, decide if each letter was an a-form or a b-form, and write a dash or a slash on the typed worksheet above the corresponding letter: a dash for a-form, a slash for b-form. Once Elizebeth made five dashes or slashes, she should check the key and write one letter of the final message. For instance, if her pattern of dashes and slashes looked like

  --//-

  then she would write the letter G.

  Elizebeth knew nothing about secret writing at this point. She had never studied codes and ciphers. She had never even been particularly fond of puzzles. She was as fresh to the whole subject as any person off the street. But Mrs. Gallup had given her the rules of the game, and now she tried to follow them.

  TheWo rkeso fWill iamSh akesp earec ontai ninga llhis Comed iesHi stori esand Trage diesT ruely setfo . . .

  She started looking back and forth between the Folio page and the biformed alphabet, trying to tell if the letters were a- or b-forms. It was slow going. She got stuck on the first couple of letters, staring and staring through the glass, unable to decide if a letter was an a- or b-form. The variations were subtle: a slight wobble in the stem of an H, a tilt in the ovals of a g. It was like trying to sort blueberries by color, or beach pebbles by smoothness. Ultimately she needed Mrs. Gallup’s help to get the answer, and it still took her eight hours to produce the twenty-four-word plaintext translation: “As I sometimes place rules and directions in other ciphers, you must seeke for the others, soone to aide in writing. Fr. of Ve (Francis of Verona).” She signed it on the bottom:

  (New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division)

  It went like this with the tests that followed. Mrs. Gallup handed Elizebeth a new Folio passage to decipher, and Elizebeth struggled for hours, solving it only with her boss’s intervention. From time to time Elizebeth carried her materials over to Gallup’s desk and set them down; Gallup pressed her eye to her looking glass, made some sharp pencil marks on Elizebeth’s sheet, and handed it back. Impressed, Elizebeth always asked Mrs. Gallup how she succeeded when Elizebeth failed—had she modified the list of a- and b-forms, tweaking the alphabet to get the “right” answer? No, she hadn’t: Elizebeth, being a novice, had failed to see the subtleties in the letters, had overlooked a little angle or an accent or a tiny shift in the position of the dot above an i.