“Elizebeth was repeatedly called in to fix messes that nobody else could fix – she was a secret weapon for hire,” says Fagone. Among the crooks she helped put behind bars were members of Al Capone’s gang. But this time they were ones penned by criminals. Having left Riverbank with her new husband, she continued to unravel encrypted messages. Ones in which the letters had been shifted in a variety of complex ways, sometimes defined by tables in books that the code-breakers had to reverse engineer using only the encrypted output and brainpower.Įven after World War One, her abilities were in high demand, explains Fagone. “In polite terms, he was insane, he was a lunatic,” explains Jason Fagone, author of a new book about Elizebeth Friedman called The Woman Who Smashed Codes.Įlizebeth was able to crack codes significantly more devilish than this. He hired talented scientists and put them to work in his laboratories, tasking them with things like inventing new munitions for the military or developing drought-resistant strains of wheat. Fabyan believed the first published book of Shakespeare’s plays contained hidden cryptographic messages that proved this.īut his country campus, Riverbank, was the site of more than one meandering endeavour. He had originally employed Elizebeth as part of a project to prove that William Shakespeare’s plays had in fact been written by his contemporary: scientist and statesman Francis Bacon. The millionaire who owned the estate where Elizebeth and William toiled was George Fabyan.
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