Among other things, Francis Bacon was a
cryptographer who invented a
bilateral cipher. Bacon was quoted as saying:
A perfect cipher must not be laborious to write and read; it must be impossible to decipher; and in some cases, it must be without suspicion.
Unfortunately, as shown below, Bacon failed to
heed his own
advice.
It was because of his work in cryptography that fed claims throughout
history that he was the true author of
Shakespeare's plays.
Horace Walpole is the first to make this claim. In the
1870's,
Ignatious Donnelly spent two
years pouring through
Shakespearean works putting together a
system of
decipherment which
proved (in his own mind) that Bacon was the author of
Shakespeare's works. He
published his findings in a book called
The great Cryptogram.
On a side note, Bacon was a
Lord of
Verulam, a lord
Chancellor during the
reign of
Queen Elizabeth I and a
lawyer.
Here is Bacon's Bilateral cipher (typically used with two
types)
Everything translates to:
aabaabaabbaabaabaaaababbabaabaaabbbabaaaabbaaaabba
A - aaaaa
B - aaaab
C - aaaba
D - aaabb
E - aabaa
F - aabab
G - aabba
H - aabbb
IJ- abaaa
K - abaab
L - ababa
M - ababb
N - abbaa
O - abbab
P - abbba
Q - abbbb
R - baaaa
S - baaab
T - baaba
UV- baabb
W - babaa
X - babab
Y - babba
Z - babbb