<
[email protected]> To:
[email protected] Subject: No sense Lee— We got it and we don’t know what to do next. Look at what it looks like: That’s part of the first page. What Ada did was copy out the whole manuscript, translated into numbers and enciphered. She got sheets printed with numbered lines, fifty to a page, and then started filling them in with her cipher numbers, four groups of ten on every line, with a dot after every two to make it look sort of mathematical. Every ten numbers stood for five letters (two numbers to a letter, if you think about it you’ll see why). But instead of writing right across the page she wrote down the page in columns, until the whole page was filled, and then started another. To read it you read down a column and then down the next.
It was enciphered with a Vigenere square, which means that you keep changing the alphabet you use to substitute with. You change the alphabet according to a keyword. You know what Ada’s keyword was?
