A History of Advertising from the Earliest Times.

by Henry Sampson

This was a little above the ordinary hand, and many attempts at deciphering it failed. At last the following explanation was published in the Quarterly. If we take the first word of the sentence, Tig, and place under its second letter, i, the one which alphabetically precedes it, and treat the next letters in a similar manner, we shall have the following combination:—

T	i	g
	h	f
		e

Reading the first letters obliquely, we have the article “The;” if we treat the second word in the same manner, the following will be the result:—

T	j	o	h	w
	i	n	g	v
		m	f	u
			e	t
				s

which read in the same slanting way produces the word Times. So far our authority is correct, and here we leave him. The following participle and article are of course evident, and then comes the principal word of the sentence, which the transcriber makes to be Jefferies, which it is doubtless intended to be; but in his hurry the inventor or solver has made a mistake, as is shown upon an attempt at the same conclusion:—

J	f	h	i	i	r	v	o	l	a
	e	g	h	h	q	u	n	k	z
		f	g	g	p	t	m	j	y
			f	f	o	s	l	i	x
				e	n	r	k	h	w
					m	q	j	g	v
						p	i	f	u
							h	e	t
								d	s
									r

This gives the word as Jeffemphdr, an expression which, if it can be expressed at all, is very dissimilar from that we expected, after being told that the sentence read—

The Times is the Jefferies of the press.

We have taken this trouble and used this space in the endeavour to see if the letters would make “Jefferies,” because we have always had a suspicion that the first explainer was also the originator. The advertisement, without being rendered into English, could not have gratified the malice or satisfied the spite of its writer; and as, if any one else had discovered the key and made the attempt, he would have remarked the error, it is but fair to assume that “F. D. N.,” whoever else he may have been, was the individual whom a writer in the Quarterly Review, a couple of years or so afterwards, described as the friend who “was curious and intelligent enough to extract the plain English out of it,” and whose design we commenced with. Was he an author who had been slated in the Times? However, as the advertiser evidently meant Jeffreys, however he may have fancied to spell it, the explanation may be taken as all right.[35] This and the preceding advertisement must have set people thinking that it was hardly safe to trust to secrets in the papers, no matter how carefully disguised; but the crowning blow to cryptographic communication was given by means of the “Flo” intrigue, which created some little sensation, and was the cause of a good deal of amusement at the close of the year 1853 and the beginning of 1854. On November 29 of the first-named year the following was first seen in the Times:—

FLO.—1821 82374 09 30 84541. 844532 18140650. 8 54584 2401 322650 526 08555 94400 021 12 30 84541 22 05114650. 726 85400 021.