the science of secrecy from ancient egypt to quantum cryptography

There is the case of the Beale ciphers, which involves Wild West escapades, a cowboy who amassed a vast fortune, a buried treasure worth $20 million, and a mysterious set of encrypted papers describing its whereabouts papers that have baffled generations of cryptanalysts and captivated hundreds of treasure hunters.Ī speedier end to a bloody war was the only reward that could be promised to the Allied code breakers of World Wars I and II, whose selfless contributions altered the course of history but few of them lived to receive any credit for their top-secret accomplishments. The result is an epic tale of human ingenuity, with examples that range from the poignant to the peculiar to the world-historical.

This is just one link in humankind's evolutionary chain of secret communication, and just one of the fascinating incidents recounted in The Code Book, written by bestselling author Simon Singh.Ĭombining a superb storyteller's sense of drama and a scientist's appreciation for technical perfection, Singh traces the evolution of secret writing from ancient Greek military espionage to the frontiers of computer science. And thus the course of British history was altered by a few sheets of cryptic prose. Mary, Queen of Scots was put to death by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth, for the high crime of treason after spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham cracked the secret code she used to communicate with her conspirators.

Codes have decided the fates of empires, countries, and monarchies throughout recorded history.

The science of secrecy from ancient egypt to quantum cryptography