The Friedman Legacy: A Tribute to William and Elizebeth Friedman

Appendix I. From Time, 17 December 1945

MAGIC WAS THE WORD FOR IT

U.S. citizens discovered last week that perhaps their most potent secret weapon of World War II was not radar, not the VT fuse, not the atom bomb – but a harmless little machine that cryptographers painstakingly constructed in a hidden room at Fort Washington.

With this machine, built after years of trial and error, of inference and deduction, cryptographers had duplicated the decoding devices used in Tokyo. Testimony before the Pearl Harbor Committee had already shown that the machine – known in Army code as "Magic" – was in use long before December 7, 1941, had given ample warning of the Jap's sneak attack – if only U.S. brass hats had been smart enough to realize it (Time, December ...