27/11/2021

Who Made "the Vigenère Cipher" as Known Today?

The Vigenère cipher as known today is not what Blaise de Vigenère proposed in his Traité de Chiffres (1586). The scheme known as "the Vigenere cipher" today became popular by Dlandol (1793). Vigenère's name was associated with it by Kerckhoffs (1883) in a classified description of polyalphabetic ciphers. While Kerckhoffs did not mean to identify the inventor, his work was so influential that the term "Vigenère cipher" took root in the vocabulary of cryptology. See my new article "Who Made "the Vigenère Cipher" as Known Today?" at Academia.edu. (I may have misunderstood the term "Published Papers" at Academia.edu. So, this is uploaded as "Draft.")
I made additional remarks in "Did Beaufort Really Use the Beaufort Cipher?"


 

21/11/2021

A Chinese Telegraph Codebook from 1941 (printed in 1968)

Following the previous post, I acquired a copy of Chinese Telegraph Codebook. This time, it is a 1941 edition from Commercial Press, printed in Hong Kong in 1968. Again, it is substantially the same as what I already described, but I added seven images in "Chinese Telegraph Code (CTC), or A Brief History of Chinese Character Code (CCC)" (and a full version in Japanese). 



 

14/11/2021

A Chinese Telegraph Codebook from 1916

Many Chinese telegraph codebooks are on sale on Chinese websites (much more than Japanese telegraph codebooks sold on Japanese websites), but I cannot order them from Japan (at least because I cannot read Chinese). The other day, I found some Chinese codebooks are available from secondhand booksellers in Japan. I was so glad of the findings that I ordered one from 1916, though I was aware that it was one I've seen on the web. As long as I got a copy, I added pictures to "Chinese Telegraph Code (CTC), or A Brief History of Chinese Character Code (CCC)" (and a full version in Japanese). 

The picture below shows the oriental binding, with two pages printed on a folded sheet (Wikipedia).


 

This was not the case when I acquired another codebook which I think is from the 1930s (reported here).