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Edgar Allan Poe

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Ciphers of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe, like other literary figures of his time, had an intense interest in cryptography. Although he never revealed his methods, Poe believed breaking ciphers and other enigmas required the straightforward application of reason and logic. In terms of his cryptographic interests, Poe is best known for his famous challenge, issued in December 1839 in Alexander's Weekly Messenger, claiming he could solve any simple substitution cipher readers of the magazine cared to submit. A simple substitution cipher is one in which the same symbol stands for the same letter of the alphabet in the concealed message. Poe's challenge also insisted the cryptograms preserve the word boundaries.
In his own words, Poe's challenge is stated as follows: "It would be by no means a labor lost to show how great a degree of rigid method enters into enigma-guessing. This may sound oddly, but it is not more strange than the well know fact that rules really exist, by means of which it is easy to decipher any species of hieroglyphical writing - that is to say writing where, in place of alphabetical letters, any kind of marks are made use of at random. For example, in place of A put % or any other arbitrary character, in place of B, a *, etc., etc. Let an entire alphabet be made in this manner, and then let this alphabet be used in any piece of writing. This writing can be read by means of a proper method. Let this be put to the test. Let anyone address us a letter in this way, and we pledge ourselves to read it forthwith, however unusual or arbitrary my be the characters employed." [C.S.Brigham, Edgar Allan Poe's Contributions to Alexander's Weekly Messenger, American Antiquarian Society, 1943]
Between December 1839 and May 1840, Poe appears to have solved all of the ciphers submitted to Alexander's. He claimed, "Out of, perhaps, one hundred ciphers altogether received, there was only one which we did not immediately succeed in solving. This one we demonstrated to be an imposition - that is to say we fully proved it a jargon of random characters, having no meaning whatsoever."
Scholars who have studied this have concluded Poe did appear to meet his challenge. In an article entitled "What Poe Knew About Cryptography," W.K. Wimsatt of Yale counted thirty-six ciphers in Alexander's, and gives the accounting, Poe printed the text and solutions to nine ciphers and the solutions (or part of the solutions) to fifteen ciphers. He simply states he has solved three ciphers, and did not solve six ciphers, which were defaced, although in one case he provided a proof the submission was not a valid cipher. All of these thirty-four are believed to be simple substitution ciphers. In addition, Poe appears to have solved a cipher where some symbols stand for more than one letter of the plaintext, and in one case a cipher in which seven different alphabets were used. In this last case, since we do not have the cipher text itself, it is believed a new alphabet was used on each line of the plain text, rather than a cipher such as Vigenere's. The cryptogram printed here occurred in the 22 April 1840 edition of Alexander's. It happens to be one of the more challenging posers since it has a couple of instances in which the same cipher symbol stands for two different plaintext letters. However, upon solving this cryptogram, Poe remarked, "We say again deliberately that human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve."

For further study and enjoyment Read Poe's famous story The Gold Bug. For more on Poe's interest in cryptography, see David Kahn's The Codebreakers (Macmillan, 1967) and see Brigham's book, cited above. See also, Poe's story The Gold Bug of which David Kahn states, "...literary cryptography took its greatest step forward with the work of Edgar Allan Poe, whose story, The Gold Bug, remains unequaled as a work of fiction turning upon a secret message." For biographical and historical information on Poe himself, visit the National Park Service's Poe site on the Web.