A woman bought a vintage dress. It had a secret pocket with a mysterious note

[Symbiote]

The code referred to is a "commercial code". There's a scan of a page from a 1910 code on Wikipedia.

Amazing that a phrase like "Confined yesterday, Twins, both dead, Mother not expected to live" was given a single code word ("Annosus").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_code_(communication...

"Unicode — The Universal Telegraphic Code Book" https://archive.org/details/unicodeuniversa00unkngoog/mode/2...

[sorokod]

BTW "Confined" has the meaning of being in labour, child birth.

[kristianp]

Man, as a parent this chills me. Before modern medicine the statistics of deaths in childbirth were scary.

[atticora]

Is the code for the weather report at all similar to the one for "help I am a prisoner in a vintage dress factory"?

[fennecfoxy]

Used for telegraphy, too. I recommend reading "The Victorian Internet" by Tom Standage.

https://www.unicode.org/L2/Historical/Unicode-Telegraphic-Ph... is an example but from what I've read there were massive volumes that included all sorts of specific stuff.

Companies coming up with their own codes to save on telegraphy costs were cool, code books with random letters smooshed together. Obviously telegraph operators had trouble with this, reducing their pace so telegraphy companies banned usage of non-words in telegrams (more on that in the book I mentioned).

[Symbiote]

From Unicode, it's interesting but not surprising that so many of the codes are for significant personal and business problems, like the birth of children, missed travel connections etc. "Diota" "Amputation is considered unnecessary". "Annexus" "Confined to-day, Twins, one alive, a girl, Mother not expected to live".

Towards the back of the book is shown a very early 'DNS'; abbreviated addresses for businesses. "Supplies, London" meant "Junior Army and Navy Stores Limited", a bit like a generic supplies.co.uk. "Jowoto, London" meant "Johnson, Walker & Tolhurst".

[thyrox]

I really hope those messages had a CRC check so as not to start wars unnecessarily.

[shrubble]

That certainly led me to a very pleasant rabbit hole! Different codes invented for different trades or professions, also...

[Animats]

Ah, yes, telegraphic codes. I once found a large code book for one of those in the stacks of a Stanford library. Every "word" had four syllables, and mapped to a longer phrase.

In the book was a loose piece of paper with a note that the telegraph company was changing their billing rules and that only known words would count as one word for billing purposes. Anything else would be charged at a higher rate for random letters and numbers.

Here's a typical telegraphic code, "The Anglo-American Code to Cheapen Telegraphy and Furnish a Complete Cypher".[1]

[1] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc1.cu55719287

[hinkley]

It’s easy to judge in retrospect, but shouldn’t the slashes have been a clue? Once I saw them my first thought was this was a checklist and someone marked each line off as it was sent.

[rokkitmensch]

My wife once bought a Burberry coat for 100 bucks off Poshmark and it came with a free gram of rather nice cocaine!

[eutropia]

The cocaine is the most sure indicator that it was genuine!

[helloplanets]

I wonder how the legal nuances of unknowingly mailing vintage cocaine to someone would work. Would the seller still be held accountable for this?

[iambateman]

Meanwhile…someday our great great grandchildren will find a MacBook from “the early 20’s” and when they open it they will see a file opened to VSCode with cryptic symbols on it.

“Iran?” they’ll wonder, “perhaps it was code for the ongoing conflict with Iran.”

But in fact it will just be someone who literally died trying to get Webpack to work on a website for pirated Tarantino films.

[neilv]

> As part of Chan’s research, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provided old weather maps that helped him determine the precise date of the weather observations in the coded note: May 27, 1888.

When the article introduced the weather report idea, I was hoping that this note was spy communications made to look like weather reports.

(Maybe the coded note wound up in a pocket because Elizabeth Bennet was joking with her sisters, pretending to be a spy.)

[MilStdJunkie]

Reminds me of when I first encountered the extraordinarily compressed 12 bit "words" in a ARINC717 data stream, where they're conserving bits that are written as-is, serially. Like three decades of computing passed it by. If something has four distinct values, it gets two bits. Then, right on top of that: is it a syncro response curve? Output the binary for the curve function. On and on, for thousands of "words", all jammed together. I used to imagine being a future researcher, trying to decode these big blocks of undifferentiated binary, the amount of legwork I'd have to accomplish to get just a few layers deep.

[userbinator]

ASN.1 PER - used widely in telco, notably GSM standards, is also extremely dense. Given what they charged for data, it's not surprising they'd want an encoding that's as efficient as possible for the overhead.

[kevinday]

https://www.noaa.gov/heritage/stories/cryptogram-in-silk-dre...

This is a slightly better and more detailed version of this story.

[rappatic]

The article hints at, but doesn't really discuss, the concept of information entropy [1]. Each word in that message has a very high entropy because it conveys a lot of information. I read an XKCD What If article [2] a while back that gives a really cool and intuitive introduction to the concept. I don't know all that much about computer science so it was a great way to get learning more.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)

[2] https://what-if.xkcd.com/34/

[weiserdaniel38]

Sending 10 words costed a dollar,which according to an inflation calendar is around $27 today.

[teruakohatu]

I am sure telegraph spam was low during that era.

[yurytom]

Anyone tried it to get access to Satoshi wallet?

[slyall]

I just finished the book "The Children’s Blizzard" by David Laskin. The Blizzard occurred in January 1888 and the book gives a good picture of the state of US weather forecasting at the time ( technology, logistics and politics).

https://lauragerold.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-childrens-blizz...

[dTal]

>As a vintage costume collector, Rivers Cofield recognized it as a dress from the 1880s — but despite its age, its delicate embroidery, bronze silk and metallic buttons appeared intact... She haggled the price down to $100 from $125. The price was higher than she usually pays...

A price that low for something this old, intact, and beautiful astounds me.

[russfink]

But why stored in a secret pocket?

[dools]

Pockets are for the help, this is a nice dress so a secret pocket is probably the only type of pocket they'd want.

[thaumasiotes]

As dools notes, female clothing doesn't usually have pockets. So if you want a pocket at all, it will probably be a secret pocket.

[timthelion]

It's always a bit surprising to me how little monitary value very old items can have.

[ethunt]

TLDR;

- A woman named Sara Rivers Cofield bought an antique Victorian dress from the 1880s at a thrift store in Maine.

- She later discovered a secret pocket inside the dress that contained two pieces of paper with seemingly random words written on them like "Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank".

- For years, amateur cryptologists online tried unsuccessfully to decode the mysterious notes.

- In 2018, a researcher named Wayne Chan stumbled upon the code online and began studying 19th century weather codes and telegraph communication.

- He eventually deduced that the notes contained a weather report from May 27, 1888 in shorthand code used by the US Army Signal Corps for economical telegraph transmission.

- The code cracked a 135-year old mystery hidden in the dress and provided a glimpse into how weather data was collected and shared in the late 19th century.

[indus]

When I got married, I received telegraph message “twenty-five” from many distant friends and relatives.

Cheaper to send a two word greeting rather than a fully decoded message.

[dheerajvs]

“twenty-five” is counted as a single word. I know because I once sent a telegram with such a number.

[dave8088]

How does 25 relate to a wedding?

[AtlasBarfed]

"You won't believe what happened next"

[INTPenis]

Why use Omit instead of t56? Or better yet, write the values in a pre-defined order and just do 56 0.08 32 no 12.

Why did they feel the need to use actual words?

[Symbiote]

Actual words were easier for the telegraph operator to send and receive so they were charged less than a scramble of letters or nonsense. Words were charged individually, but could be up to 10 letters long. It makes sense to avoid the shortest words to get some error correction, "— ." = "T E" could be misheard as "—." = "N".

The international regulations limited the cheaper rate messages to only certain languages, of which one was Latin, so the codebooks used that to avoid confusion with modern languages.

(See my other comment and read the introduction in the linked book.)

[renewiltord]

Presumably has built in error-correction. You don't want to go from t56 "Cholera, family dead, stock market crash" to t66 "Buy farmland, rains predicted good" in one typo.

[kevingadd]

Can imagine this approach being less error-prone for laymen, in the same way that passphrases (word word word word word) can be friendlier than passwords (word12345678).

[stevage]

Because the telegram company charges more for non words.

[hashtag-til]

Good point to link to what3words.

Have a look, it’s a geographic encoding system.

[mertd]

These garments aren't washed with water?