Cracking the code: messages found in silk dress decoded by Manitoba researcher

Coded messages found in the folds of a Victorian-era dress were finally cracked by a University of Manitoba researcher almost a decade after they were discovered.

Coded messages found in the folds of a Victorian-era dress were finally cracked by a University of Manitoba researcher almost a decade after they were discovered.

The code, dubbed The Silk Dress Cryptogram, was once considered one of the top 50 unsolved codes in the world until it was cracked by Wayne Chan in 2022.

“It was a good feeling that after, you know, close to 10 years, it was finally solved,” Chan said about his efforts which were published in the August 2023 edition of the journal, Cryptologia.

The dress was purchased for $100 in Maine in 2013 by Sara Rivers Cofield, an archeological curator. When she examined the dress closely, she discovered a hidden pocket containing two handwritten notes made of apparently random words. One sentence, for example, has the line, “Smith, nostrum, linnet, get, none, event.”

Rivers Cofield posted images of the message on her blog asking cryptologists and codebreakers to help solve the puzzle but no one was able to solve it. It was then picked up by crypto-historian Klaus Schmeh’s blog as one of the top 50 unsolved codes and ciphers, ranking 32nd, 30 spots below the Zodiac Killer letters.