Research analyst cracks mysterious code hidden inside a vintage dress a decade after it was found
From messages in bottles to cryptic texts on scrolls, different forms of communication have been used by people across the ages to make sure their stories are unearthed centuries down the line. A decade ago archaeologist and antique dress collector Sara Rivers Cofield discovered something in a dress that blew people's minds. According to Smithsonian Magazine, Cofield found two pieces of crumpled paper hidden inside a secret pocket sewn into a gown from the mid-1800s. The paper contained a series of confusing words that read, “Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank" and “Calgary, Cuba, unguard, confute, duck, Fagan.” Cofield shared her discovery and an image of the dress on her blog back in February 2014.
The dress which was described as "Bennett's Bronze Bustle" gained a lot of attention and the puzzling message found inside made it to the list of 50 most “unsolvable” codes in the world, as per National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). However, Wayne Chan, a research computer analyst at the University of Manitoba in Canada, has figured out that the code might have been used to transmit local weather reports via telegraph.
Chan published a study in the journal Cryptologia where he explained how telegraph companies used to charge people by words. So it only made sense for people to relay their messages in fewer words and save some extra bucks on sending a telegraph. Chan noted that the first word "Bismark" seemed to point towards the weather in the city in North Dakota, on May 27, 1888, at 10 p.m. The rest of the words held weather data in a clever fashion such as air temperature, barometric pressure, dew point, precipitation, wind direction, cloud conditions, wind velocity, and sunset observations.
“For the first time, the telegraph allowed news about the weather to travel faster than the weather itself,” Chan told CBS News. To decode the words, Chan skimmed through 170 different codebooks but did not meet any success initially. He finally found a book from the section of the U.S. Army Signal Corps’ weather code and realized that he might be close to finding an answer to his questions. Chan got in touch with one NOAA librarian who introduced him to an 1892 telegraphic code book for the weather. This helped Chan to ultimately crack the code as he determined that the secret messages were from Army Signal Service weather stations in the U.S. and Canada, as per NOAA.
The line "Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank” meant that the temperature in Bismarck was 56 degrees Fahrenheit and the barometric pressure was 30.08. The word “leafage” referred to the dew point that was 32 degrees at 10 p.m. "Buck" meant that the skies were clear with no precipitation and wind from the north and "bank" was for the wind speed that was blowing at 12 miles per hour. even though Chan managed to crack the code, neither he nor Cofielf could reveal who owned the dress and how the weather codes ended up in the dress. They believe that it could belong to one of the several women who were employed as clerical staff for the Army Signal Service in Washington, D.C. in the 1880s but the mystery about the dress' real owner remains unsolved.
Cofield had purchased the bronze-colored dress from an antique mall in Maine in 2013. In her blog, she mentioned that the dress is a "mid-1880s two-piece bustle dress of bronze silk with striped rust velvet accents and lace cuffs." The silk dress was in good condition and even had images of Ophelia from William Shakespeare’s "Hamlet" on the original buttons. Cofield examined the dress and found a paper tag sewn into the bodice of the dress that bore the name "Bennett" and she found the pieces of paper in a pocket that was hidden by the overskirt of the dress. “It wouldn’t have been possible to get at the pocket at all without causing a rip if someone had the dress on,” Cofield wrote on her blog. “It’s a bit of a private spot—it almost seems like it was protected."