As you know, I publish clippings from the late 1800s and early 1900s about typewriters. The following is one of the most charming pieces I’ve come across. In it, a young typist describes a cipher she created in order to communicate with her beau. Her letter to The Typewriter News sheds interesting light on the goings-on at these business schools:
You see I am a favorite with my teacher… except that she knows I correspond in school with this young man (we used to hand notes across the aisle until she found it out and moved him, and now another young lady and a boy pass them for us) but although she made him give up two of the notes, she could not read them, because of the cipher I invented and gave to the young man the key to.
From The Typewriter News (New York), January 1913 –
© 2020, Mark Adams. All rights reserved.
Sweetly clever–a fun read!
That works until someone who understands letter substitution ciphers does a brute force frequency analysis and breaks the cipher. Etaoin shrdlu strikes again! 😀