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In 1547, Charles V penned a letter to his ambassador, Jean de Saint-Mauris, part of which was written in the ruler’s secret code. Nearly five centuries later, researchers have finally cracked that code.

Cecile Pierrot, a cryptographer with the Loria laboratory in France, first heard of the letter’s existence at a dinner in 2019 and finally managed to track it down two years later.

The task proved rather daunting since the approximately 120 encrypted symbols didn’t employ a simple symbol-to-letter representation. Most represented letters or combinations of letters but others represented entire words. For example: a needle was used to represent the English King Henry VIII. Vowels that came after consonants were replaced by diacritical marks, except for the letter ‘e’ (the most commonly used letter), which the code makers cleverly avoided using as much as possible.

The big break occurred thanks to historian Camille Desenclos, who directed Pierrot to several other coded letters written by, and sent to, the emperor. One of which turned out to have been informally translated and became the key for cracking the code.

One of my favorite movies was The Hunt for Red October. In it, Sean Connery plays a Soviet sub commander in control of a nearly silent intercontinental ballistic submarine. Its silence comes from a hypothetical magnetohydrodynamic drive that had no propellers. But this was all fiction, wasn’t it?

When I was in high school, our science team took a trip to Fermi lab and Argonne National Laboratories up near Chicago. I was captivated. I still remember the discussion on subatomic particles by the Fermi lab speaker and seeing some of the devices such as the Tevatron. I still remember him talking about plans for an even larger collider being planned in Europe (hint, they built it).

At Argonne labs, we took another tour. At one point, we went into one of the large warehouse labs and there was a giant circular machine. The guide told us it was, in fact, an experimental magnetohydrodynamic drive. He shared some interesting anecdotes about the device. It turns out, the principles were sound. By creating a gigantic magnetic field one could indeed introduce thrust from salt-water passed through the center of it. If you want to make one, it is not complex and there are even YouTube videos demonstrating small devices.

The biggest problem? It wasn’t very fast, and you needed a GIANT magnetic field. It also didn’t work in fresh water and had a variety of other limitations and caveats.

The Japanese experimented with the technology as well and there were numerous prototypes developed. They also ran into the same problems but it did advance the field a bit by using smaller and more powerful superconducting magnetic systems to introduce the field. It works fairly well on a small scale, but pushing something as large as a transport ship or ballistic missile submarine was untenable. Not much has happened since those days as the physics of the system simply don’t work out – though China recently announced their experiments.

Still, it was absolutely fascinating to see something that was on movies and hinted at as secret technology in person. I think it was a big part of what got me interested in science and led me to computer science years later.

There has also a lot of suggestions that The Hunt for Red October book, publish from a nobody salesman via the Navy Institute Press, contained then-classified secrets, and happened at the same time of several strange submarine incidents was actually a ploy to signal certain messages to the Soviet Union. Since Tom Clancy recently died, we may never know for sure. But it wouldn’t be the first time this has happened.

Links:

• https://onepetro.org/ISOPEIOPEC/proceedings-abstract/ISOPE94/All-ISOPE94/ISOPE-I-94-182/26362

Unreal just gave a great multi-hour presentation at GDC on all the new technology in the Unreal Engine.