Classic
in the annals of cryptographic invention is the case history of John F.
Byrne, who stuck with his cipher through repeated rebuffs for more than
35 years. Byrne was an intimate of James Joyce: they were
students together at Dublin, and Joyce modeled Cranly in his Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man upon Byrne, and made Byrne’s
residence, 7 Eccles Street, Dublin, the home of Leopold and Mollie
Bloom, the two protagonists of his great Ulysses. It was in 1918
that Byrne hit upon the principle of his "Chaocipher", which he never
disclosed publicly but was an autokey. It required nothing more
than a cigar box and a few bits of string and odds and ends for its
operation. When he showed it to his cousin, she exclaimed that it
would bring him a Nobel Prize -- not for science, apparently, but for
ushering in an age of universal peace by conferring the gift of perfect
security upon the communications of all nations and all men. Wrote
Byrne: "When
I first set out to discover a system for concocting an indecipherable
cipher, I had it clearly in mind that such a system would and should be
universally available. I envisioned, for instance, the
utilization of my method and machine by businessmen for business
communications, and by brotherhoods and social and religious
institutions. I believe that my method and machine would be an
invaluable asset to big religious institutions, as for example the
Catholic Church with worldwide ramifications. I had, and still
have in mind the universal use of my machine and method by husband,
wife, or lover. My machine would be on hire, as typewriter
machines now are, in hotels, steamships and, maybe even on trains and
airliners, available for anyone anywhere and at any time. And I
believe, too, that the time will come -- and come soon -- when my
system will be used in the publication of pamphlets and books written
in cipher which will be unreadable except by those who are specially
initiated." Byrne corresponded with Colonel Parker Hitt, and in 1922 demonstrated his machine before [William F.] Friedman and Colonel Frank Moorman, former head of G.2 A.6, then handling cryptography for the Signal Corps. They did not want it. He offered it to the State Department, which replied with a form letter stating that its "ciphers are adequate to its needs" -- a statement that Byrne rightly damned as "a paragon of smugness." He submitted it to the Navy in 1937-39, negotiating apparently with Commander Joseph N. Wenger, and to A. T. & T.’s Ralzemond D. Parker, chief of company development and research and Vernam’s boss when he invented the on-line mechanism. Nobody took it. Byrne’s faith remained undaunted. He had a little brochure printed in which he enciphered known texts in his Chaocipher and defied the world to break it. Toward the close of his life, he wrote a book of reminiscences. It told much about his days with Joyce, but his real reason for writing it was not to shed light on early Joyce but to get his Chaocipher before a larger audiences. The 21st and last chapter of Silent Years: An Autobiography with Memoirs of James Joyce and Our Ireland, comprising fully one eighth of the book, recapitulated the story of his Chaocipher. Byrne concluded by betting $5,000 or the total royalties of the first three months after publication of his book that no one would be able to solve the message in Chaocipher that he printed in extenso in the final pages. He flung the challenge also at the amateurs of the American Cryptogram Association and the New York Cipher Society and at Norbert Wiener, father of cybernetics, and to other believers in the capabilities of the electronic calculating machines. Nobody ever claimed the money, and Byrne died a few years later. One may presume that the reason both for the failure of the public to read his cipher and for the failure of the government to adopt it was that while the cipher probably had many merits, its many demerits outweighed them for practical use. Byrne, like many inventors, both won and lost. His cipher was never broken. But his dream never came true. |