DRESS CODE BROKEN (YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST)

SORTA. SIMANAITISSAYS WAS LESS THAN three months old when it posted “Travelers’ Code,” November 5, 2012. And now Popular Mechanics, January 2, 2024, posts “A Woman Hid This Secret Code in her Silk Dress in 1888—and Codebreakers Just Solved It.”

The Silk Dress Cryptogram. As recounted in Popular Mechanics, “For a decade, codebreakers have tried—and failed—to solve the case of the crumpled paper that was found stuffed in a secret pocket under the bustle and inside the seams of a silk dress from the 1880s. Over the years, the mystery even earned its own moniker: The Silk Dress Cryptogram.” 

“Now, we have some answers—and they come from unlikely sources: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and a data analyst at the University of Manitoba.”

Its Origin. Back in the 1880s, a woman tucked a coded message into a secret pocket of her dress. As SimanaitisSays readers may recall, there’s a reason the pocket was secret: Pockets were “At First, Mostly Male Stuff”: “Unlike kangaroos, human women (and other second-class citizens) have always had a harder time securing storage close to their person.”

The Message Survives a 2013 Antique Sale. Popular Mechanics continues the tale when Sara Rivers-Cofield bought the dress in 2013 and found the secret-pocket message: “Rivers-Cofield posted a blog at the time about discovering not only the completely concealed secret pocket, but also what appeared to be a code. ‘I’m putting it up here in case there’s some decoding prodigy out there looking for a project,’ she wrote on her blog.”

The message reads in part “Bismark Omit leafage buck bank.” Note as well the numbers between lines and marginal notes of 1113pm and 1124p. Image courtesy of Sara Rivers-Cofield.

Popular Mechanics recounts, “The theories proliferated. Illicit gambling codes? Dress measurements? Spy talk? Nope. After an initial flurry of unfounded guesses, the more experienced codebreakers focused in on the note being a type of telegraphic code—a shorthand created to limit the number of words sent as telegraph companies charged by the word.”

Telegraphic Code! Long-timer readers (hem hem) of SimanaitisSays may recall Blair & Co’s Travelers’ Code, a book of such telegraphic shorthand.

I checked my Blair & Co’s, but found that its coded words (many of considerable length) began with A, B, or C.  “Constratum Cennamella,” for example, translates into “Will be at your hotel, last of this week or early part of next; please reserve three rooms, bath and parlor, connecting, for self, wife, children and maid.” Thus it’s quite a telegraphic savings: pricing out at two words to convey a 28-word message.

Finding the Correct Book. Wayne Chan is a data analyst at the University of Manitoba and a hobby codebreaker. He looked through scads of such code books until, as Popular Mechanics reports, he “read about weather codes used by the U.S. Army Signal Corps…. including one published in 1892 that proved he was on the right track. Combining resources, Chan cracked the code, publishing his findings in the journal Cryptologia.”

Coded Weather Reports. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration gives details: “Each line written on the papers indicated weather observations at a given location and time of day, which was telegraphed into a central Signal Corps office in Washington, D.C.”

For example “Bismark Omit leafage buck bank” described conditions in Bismark Station (Dakota Territory); Omit decoded to Air temperature 56 F; Barometric pressure, 0.08 Hg (short for 30.08 Hg); Leafage indicated a Dew point 32ºF; Buck identified State of weather Clear, Precipitation None, wind direction North; and Bank described Current wind velocity: 12 mph, Sunset: Clear.”

It was May 27, 1888. NOAA notes that old daily Signal Service weather maps provided from the NOAA Central Library suggested that the Bismark observations were taken on May 27, 1888.

U.S. War Department (Signal Service) daily weather map for May 27, 1888 at 10:00 p.m. Image from NOAA. 

If both Bismark and D.C. had a copy of Blair & Co’s, Bismark could have added “Adonner Capioglan,” i.e., “Change is likely to take place in 1 hour.” 

I’m not surprised that Blair & Co’s has no code words for NOAA’s “We may never know who owned the dress or why she had weather codes stuffed into a hard-to-access pocket near her petticoats one spring day.” ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024