ST. LEONARD, Md. – In December 2013, Sarah Rivers-Cofield, an Archeological Curator of Jefferson Patterson Park & Museum, bought a Victorian-era bustle dress from an antique shop in Maine. Cofield later found a secret pocket when she turned the skirt inside out. The pocket contained a couple of mysteriously handwritten messages.
“Inside the pocket, Rivers-Cofield found a balled-up wad of paper, which turned out to be two crumpled sheets of translucent paper, each measuring approximately 7.5 in. x 11 in. (19 cm x 28 cm) Each sheet contained 12 lines of cursive writing, with each line containing 2–7 words in English. The sheets were unnumbered, so it is not clear if there was an order to them. There were wide margins on the left and right sides of the text and some lines were continued underneath and indented to indicate that the words belonged to the same line,” as stated in a research paper written by Wayne Chan, an Analyst with the Centre for Earth Observation Science (CEOS) at the University of Manitoba, who ultimately broke the code.
“Most lines had a numeral near the start of the line which appeared to indicate the number of words in the line. In the left margin, there were stroke marks beside each line of text made with a blue-green pencil. These markings seem to indicate that the line had been checked in some way. In the top-left corner, there appears to be a time of day written. On one sheet, the time was “101 PM” and on the other sheet, there were two times present: “1115 PM” was written next to the first line, and “1124 P” was written adjacent to the fifth line.”
The code was deemed the “Silk Dress Cryptogram” and, up until recently, was one of the top 50 unsolved codes and ciphers in the world according to the University of Manitoba CEOS.
Around December 2023, the message was ultimately revealed to be a coded weather report for May 27, 1888.
The message was encoded using a 19th-century telegraphic weather code used by the United States Army Signal Corps, which served as the national weather service for the U.S. during the late 1800s.
“The code was used to compress the weather reports so that they could be transmitted by telegraph more economically, as messages were charged by the word,” stated Chan.
“A few mysteries still surround the cryptogram. Why were coded weather observations in a hidden pocket of the dress? What was the person’s motivation for retaining the messages? The answers to these questions may never be known, but we have at least shed light on much of the Silk Dress cryptogram,” Chan concluded.
For more information, you can watch a 17-minute graphic novelization of the solution, or read the research article written by Chan.
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