Encryption in the 1790s

Hackaday explores encryption history through Thomas Jefferson and a disk cipher he described in the seventeen nineties. The system used thirty-six numbered wheels, each with a randomized alphabet. You and a friend would arrange your matching disks in the same secret order, line up your message on one row, and read the ciphertext from another. While Jefferson gets the credit, the device likely predates him, and there's no evidence he actually built it. The U.S. Military did adopt a variant in nineteen twenty-two as the M-94 machine, which saw service through World War Two.

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