The Mystery 19th-Century Code Found in a Dress

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. In 2013, an archaeologist from Maryland named Sarah Rivers Cofield was visiting her mom in Maine, and she came across an antique dress in a vintage clothing store.

And when I say antique, I mean it had a bodice and lacy sleeves and a bustle. And Cofield bought it, and then later she discovered that inside the bustle was a secret pocket.

And inside that pocket were two pieces of paper. Each of them was several lines of handwritten cryptic words separated by commas.

And one line on one of those sheets read Bismarck, omit, leafage, buck, bank. And another one read, Paul, ramify, Lomi, event, false, new, event.

What in the world was that? And so Cofield was puzzled. She was trying to figure out what the previous owner of the dress was doing with these pieces of paper.

Was she some sort of spy? Did this involve illegal gambling? Were they maybe cryptic love notes for some secret affair? She was baffled, so she posted those photos to her blog asking for help, and nothing happened for a while, and she forgot about it.

But then in 2018, a researcher at the University of Manitoba, Canada, Wayne Chan, who solves codes as a hobby, started looking into this, and three years later, Grant, he figured out the answer.

Oh my goodness. It turns out that these seemingly random words were part of a sophisticated code that were used in the late 1800s to transmit information about the weather.

The weather? Yes. Oh, I was envisioning great intrigues involving international conspiracies, but it was just the weather.

It was just the weather. Because at that time, the Army Signal Corps functioned as the National Weather Service, and they had a manual that used pages and pages of long lists of code words for various weather observations.

Because those were a handy way of condensing detailed information and transmitting it by telegraph really quickly and efficiently. And so each of those lines listed the station location, and then it was followed by code words that indicated temperature and pressure and cloud conditions and things like that.

So, for example, that line Bismarck, omit, leafage, buck, bank. If you cross-reference those five words with the list in the codebook, then you get a weather report that says, at the Bismarck Station, the temperature was 56 degrees with a pressure of 0.08 inches of mercury, a dew point of 32 degrees at 10 p.m. with no precipitation, and a northerly wind of 12 miles per hour, and at sunset, the sky was clear.

That’s so amazing! That’s so amazing! I love it! And Wayne Chan published his research online.

We will link to it because it’s super cool. And there are pictures of the pages of all these words. You know, at first it’s overwhelming, but you look at it for a while and you start to remember this means that and this means that.

And you can see how that would be a great way to send telegraphic messages. And his research proved so accurate that he actually figured out the day that those pages referred to.

Those pages with those coded words were reports of the weather on May 27, 1888. How cool is that? And that helps date the dress that they were found in, too.

That is so wonderful. We have talked about commercial codes on the show before, which are, again, ways to send long messages with just a few keywords.

But this is a whole other level. It is. And I highly recommend taking a look at his research.

He’s even made a little video. It’s like a graphic novel of his experience, and we’ll link to that online as well because it’s all super cool.

Codes and ciphers have always been a big part of language. What are the codes in your life? What are the ciphers you’ve discovered?

877-929-9673, or tell us the sordid details about the weather in email to words@waywordradio.org.