Chapter 21. John H. Haswell: Codemaker
"It will not perhaps have escaped your recollection that the first cipher message as received at the Department from our minister to Turkey formed one long string of connected letters, which for a time was considered by many in the Department as a conundrum."
In the 1870s John Haswell renewed the pioneering cryptographic endeavors of Charles W. F. Dumas, James Lovell, and Edmund Randolph, who inaugurated unique systems for masking U.S. diplomatic correspondence one hundred years earlier. Sensitive to the innovative world of cable messages, Haswell recognized the necessity for providing American post-Civil War diplomats with an efficient, secure, and economical communications instrument. He was born in Albany, ...
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