Codes and Language Human beings have spent thousands of years trying to hide communications, especially those instructions which are sent out to their forces during times of war. One thing you can be sure of is in modern times there is constant science going on to try and encode all our radio communications, along with other types. During some of the modern wars, and even between them it was said a popular code for written messages was using a book, which was only known to the coders and using page, paragraph and word or even letter placement on the pages to spell out a message. I don’t imagine this would work very well today due to advancements in computer science. Originally, it may not have been needed, because in very ancient times hardly anyone could read and the chance of them reading the enemies language might have been miniscule. That changed as time went on and the Romans thought they were clever when they covered their tablets with wax to hide what they said. We would laugh at such an attempt today; it certainly wouldn’t fool anyone. When the ancient Egyptians communicated with their armies using hieroglyphs, it must have really been puzzling to their enemies if the messages were intercepted. Only kings, scribes and priests could read, so the messages had to be passed to a special person with the military who could decipher them. The Mesopotamian civilization gave school a high priority. The written language was hard to learn and some never mastered it entirely. Children went to school from the ages of 7 or 8 years old. In Babylon everyone was taught not only writing and reading, but sentence structure and reinforcement was used to keep people skilled in these skills. Just because something was ancient which was encoded doesn’t mean we can break that code even today. One of the coded works was the famous Voynich manuscript. It is from the 15th century and was discovered in 1912, and a lot of researchers have sweated over it trying to figure out what it says. Recently researchers have said they finally translated some of the book and know what it is about. They claim it is about women’s health. One part of the work states if a woman doesn’t feel well, they should take a nice bath. I guess this was a big disappointment to those who might have thought it was a treasure map or something like that. We pride ourselves as being an advanced race with all sorts of computer power behind us and yet there are still languages which we cannot decipher. They are: There could be others we will find in the future. Maybe future archaeologists will turn up proof of written languages for some of the civilizations we believe to have no written language. Not being able to read a language or a message while sometimes can be annoying, other times it is vital to our national security to be able to read that message. We faced this problem in the different wars we had, but no adversary put more work and skill into coding their secret messages than the Germans in World War 2. They developed the Enigma machine which looked similar to a typewriter with several wheels on it which allowed the machine to create and read messages that had many millions of different combinations in its code. It took a primitive computer to break the code. After we broke it, we had to allow certain German operations to continue after discovered, because we did not want the Germans to suspect we had broken the code. World War 1 saw the use of different codes skyrocket. There were now more ways to communicate than ever, and these messages had to be kept secret. A list of 130 code words from the war were found which were used by the United States forces. A key was needed to understand their meaning and the meaning for the entire message. There were actually thousands of words used and the list that was found is only a partial list of the words. For the first time radio was added to the many different ways communications could be sent. Some of the other ways were by pigeon, telegraph, signal lights, semaphore flags, and dogs. When I was a kid, there were code rings available from our radio heroes. They were simple devices which could uncode a message given over the radio. For example, you would take your ring and turn it to the letters given and for each one a substitute letter would be revealed which made a word. You could get a simple sentence this way. This type of code could never be used seriously because it is one of the simplest to break. When you are 7 or 8 years old this was a lot of fun and you thought you were really breaking a secret code. During our Civil War a man named Anson Stager developed a system of code words. It used the telegraph to send messages and you had to have the list of substituted words. This way what looked like an unimportant message could be a valuable one. This code was used by the Union Army. The Southern Army had their code also. When the telegraph was invented, it was capable of making clicking sounds and a system had to be invented to allow these sounds to be turned into messages. In 1836 Samuel Morse an artist, along with physicist Joseph Henry and Alfred Vail developed the telegraph, the next step was taken by Morse who developed the system of dots and dashes, long and short clicks, which would stand in for letters of the alphabet. Today, coders are working furiously trying to develop systems which cannot be broken, but many of us believe no such system can ever exist. This is not the opinion of those developing quantum computers. They believe they can create an unbreakable coding system using these computers. I say if you create a code with a device and others have a similar device, there is a good chance that code will be broken, but that is just my opinion. Through history many have thought their codes were unbreakable.
|
