Charles Babbage and deciphering codes (1864)
Charles Babbage wrote an autobiography Passages from the Life of a Philosopher which was published in London in 1864 . In our biography of Babbage we have quoted several passages from the book which tell us about his life and the analytical engine. Here we quote from Chapter XVIII of the book where Babbage writes about deciphering. What we present here is only an extract. In fact we omit a more technical part which describes the considerable effort that he had put in constructing dictionaries wi