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.
- 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.