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Source: tiktok.com
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After I had so much fun cracking the series of 175-year-old coded messages I found in the New York Herald personal ads, I thought I'd give a few of the other coded messages I've found over the years a shot.
The following ad appeared in the Herald on May 26, 1875.
I got out my note book and started to break things down, worked out that F=E, and wrote out the whole damn alphabet by hand ready to figure out the rest - and then realized it's literally just shifted one letter.
Every letter is just the letter that comes before it in the alphabet. B=A, C=B, D=C, etc, etc.
"ABE JONES YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN. IF YOU
would see me answer through these personals when and
where. F. S."
I've unfortunately not come across anything that appears to be a response or any additional messages from either Abe or F.S., but there's something charming about decoding a 150-year-old message about not being forgotten.
So cheers Abe Jones! Even if it's by a few random people on the internet, you are not forgotten.
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My favorite inadvertently creepy photography convention from Victorian times actually is the "hidden mother" photograph. As we know, taking pictures of wiggly babies is hard, especially if their mothers aren't holding them. But for some reason people keep insisting on having baby photos taken with only the babies.
The Victorian solution to this...was to just throw a blanket over the mother and pretend she wasn't there.
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A jewel box of a book ✨ This 19th century French sales sample book contains very thin metal ornaments, made of foil over card. These would have been used like fancy sequins, and adorned everything from cards to clothes! They’re sometimes called Dresdens after the town in Germany where many were made. I know I say this a lot, but this book really floored me 🤩 Part of col. 838 in the Winterthur Library 📚
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The other night I reorganized the folder on my computer where I keep all the weird New York Herald personal ads I post.
Over the years I've been clipping these I've come across a handful of personals that were just straight up written in code.
As I was going through the folder I noticed that almost all the coded ads were printed within a year or two of each other (specifically between 1850 and 1852). Looking a bit more closely I also began to realize that the same coded words and phrases were appearing across multiple personals - suggesting they were all written in the same code (which appeared to be a basic substitution cipher), likely by the same person/people.
Possessing multiple samples of the code, struck by the type of confidence that only hits at 11:30 at night, and having the little know-how remaining from a special interest in cryptology in middle school, I thought... I bet I can crack that.
So I took the longest coded personal I had at the time (the image directly above - I've since found a much longer one), cracked open a notebook and got cryptoquip-ing.
I had a few little hitches due to words being mispelled in the original ad and a few unclear letters due to poor quality newsprint, but I soon found myself with a mostly decoded message...
"This morning at elevn[sic] precisely be at Carter's bookstore two eighty five Broadway. As a prete?h ask for their directory. Don't fail."
I made myself a key (V and W are Q and Z, but as neither letter is ever used in an ad there's no way to tell which is which.)...
...and got to decoding the other personal ads and putting them chronological order.
Let's see what was worth encoding 175 years ago...
