Free The Philosophical Breakfast Club by Laura J. Snyder Page A

for surely Babbage’s work for the government would have been considered top secret, omitted even from written government reports. Babbage may have been giving a hint of his involvement in the pages of the
Journal
. By applying Babbage’s rule for finding the key, one expert has determined that the key term used by Babbage in encrypting the Thwaites passage was the rather provocative expression “Foreign Supremacy.” 31
    Another tantalizing clue pointing to Babbage’s involvement with the military is a draft of a letter from a mysterious “F. Williamson” found in Babbage’s papers. The letter is addressed to an anonymous “Lord” who had recently given a speech about the use of ciphers over the telegraph. This must be Lord Palmerston, the newly appointed prime minister, who had spoken in the House of Commons in May about the reason why the government was not publicly releasing certain messages that had been received over the telegraph in cipher; frustrations about this had been expressed a week before in a
Times
editorial. 32 In that speech, Lord Palmerston had defended his government’s reticence, noting that if someone had both the cipher text and the plain text, he would be able to discover the cipher and use it to decipher other secret messages. 33 The letter-writer countered this claim by referring to the undecipherable cipher of “his friend” Mr. Thwaites, noting that even though he had published the cipher text and plain text, it was impossible to determine the cipher itself. The writer gushed that “Mr. Tw. is perhaps the greatest decypher [
sic
] in Europe!” He advised Palmerston to forward Thwaites’s name and address to Mr. Hammond at the Foreign Office—this would be Edmund Hammond, recently named undersecretary of state in charge of Secret Service, a position he would hold for another twenty years, and in which Hammond would later be described as “keeping everything … under the solemn pall of secrecy. 34
    Why would a
draft
of this letter find its way to Babbage? Both Lord Palmerston and Williamson, whoever he was, would have read in the
Times
a few weeks earlier about Babbage’s talents in breaking the cipher used by Captain Childe. Did Palmerston—who had been a student decades earlier of Babbage’s friend Dugald Stewart in Edinburgh—request that this mysterious Mr. Williamson send Babbage a copy of his letter, so that Palmerston could solicit Babbage’s advice about this cipher? Or did Williamson send Babbage the draft of the letter asking for his opinion before sending it on to Palmerston? Short of uncovering a new batch of correspondence on this topic, we will never learn the truth about this mystifying letter.
    In his
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher
, published in 1864, Babbage takes credit for every one of his actual achievements and several that are more dubious—for example, being the mastermind behind the foundation of Section F of the British Association, which was actually due to the inspiration of Jones and the careful planning of Whewell; and even being the host of the meetings of the Philosophical Breakfast Club, when they were really held in Herschel’s rooms. It is inconceivable that Babbage would have kept secret his success at breaking the “unbreakable cipher”—a work of mathematical, statistical, and intuitive genius—unless he had been ordered to do so. By the time Babbage wrote the
Passages
, Kasiski’s pamphlet had appeared in Prussia, but it was not translated into English, so Babbage would not have known that the solution had already been exposed (the pamphlet did not receive much attention, even in Prussia). Four years later, in 1868, the mathematician and author of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
, Charles Dodgson, writing under his pen name, Lewis Carroll, deemed the Vigenère cipher “unbreakable” in a short piece he wrote called “The Alphabet Cipher.” 35 Babbage would have believed that he was still under the command to keep