Secret Messages

Secret Messages

Invisible Ink -
George Washington used invisible ink to communicate with his spies during the American Revolutionary War. He suggested the secret messages be written in between the lines of a letter, or on the blank pages of common books. The inks would have to be developed with either heat from a flame, or chemicals to be readable. He referred to his invisible ink as “the medicine”.

The Scytale -
Is one of the earliest encryption devices, and was used by the Spartans for military communications in ancient Greece. A scytale is a rod around which a strip of leather or paper is wrapped. Once wrapped, a message is written down the length of the rod. When the leather strip is removed, it appears to be a list of individual letters with no meaning until the recipient wraps it around a rod of the same diameter. If someone intercepts the message and wraps it around a rod of a different diameter, the letters will not line up, and the message is still indecipherable.

Code Talkers -
Were Native American soldiers who used their native languages to communicate secret messages for the US military from WWI all the way through the Vietnam war. Many different American tribes were employed, but the Navajo were the most famous.

They used two types of codes. The first was a simple substitution, using Navajo words to represent letters in the English alphabet. For example, the Navajo words for ant, apple, or axe would stand for the letter “a”.

The second was simply speaking in Navajo, a language the enemy (and most of their fellow soldiers) could not understand. When the Navajo language didn’t have a word for something, they came up with their own. An aircraft carrier was called a “bird carrier”, and a submarine was an “iron fish”.

The Navajo code is the only spoken military code that was never deciphered by the enemy. Not only was it a very secure way of communicating, it was also very fast. Since the code talkers were simply speaking their native languages, they could communicate a message in minutes that would have taken hours with the military’s other forms of encryption.

Crafting Table -
I don’t know much about Crafting Table, but I believe it was invented in 1978.

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George Washington’s Invisible Ink
https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/the-revolutionary-war/spying-and-espionage/spy-techniques-of-the-revolutionary-war/

Scytale
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scytale

Navajo Code Talkers
https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/navajo-code-talkers-and-the-unbreakable-code/
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/american-indian-code-talkers