Tag Archives: Galileo

The Puzzling Art of Letterlocking

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letterlocking

[Image courtesy of Letter Writers Alliance.]

When you think about puzzles and personal security, what comes to mind?

Do you think of puzzle boxes, those delightfully tricky little wooden creations with all their sliding pieces and hidden compartments? Or does your mind go to encryption, the art of concealing your message in plain sight with ciphers, scytales, and other techniques meant to baffle anyone but those in the know?

Some puzzle box designs date back centuries, and ciphers can be traced back even further. (One is named after Caesar, after all.)

But there’s another centuries-old puzzly procedure you might not know about, and it kept letters and messages safe using nothing more than paper and wax.

butterflylock

[Image courtesy of ibookbinding.com.]

This technique is known as letterlocking. It involves a mix of precise folds, interlocking pieces of paper, and sealing wax in order to create a distinctive design or pattern.

Although the pattern itself can work like a puzzle — requiring a particular trick to unfold it and reveal the message without ripping or damaging the letter — that’s only a secondary line of defense. The true goal of letterlocking is to reveal tampering. The folding techniques are distinctive, and the wax creates points of adhesion.

If you receive a letter and the folds are done (aka redone) incorrectly, or the wax is smeared (or the paper ripped where the wax would have held it tight), then you know the letter has been compromised.

daggertrap

[Image courtesy of ibookbinding.com.]

Some examples of letterlocking trace back to the 13th century, and key figures like Queen Elizabeth I, Machiavelli, Galileo, and Marie Antoinette employed letterlocking security in the past. Mary, Queen of Scots, wrote a message and letterlocked it with a butterfly lock six hours before her beheading. (For a more modern reference, letterlocking was employed in the Harry Potter films as well, most famously in Dumbledore’s will.)

The various techniques involved are as distinctive as knots. The triangle lock. The dagger-trap. The pinwheel letter. And some historians believe that those techniques imply connections between some of the important players in history.

For instance, both poet John Donne and the spymaster of Queen Elizabeth I employed a similar letterlocking style. Did they share a common source, or even an instructor in common? Or did a particular letterlocking technique provide a clue as to the contents of the letter within?

Letterlocking is a historical curiosity that was seemingly lost to time after the proliferation of the envelope and other security techniques, but it is slowly being rediscovered by a new generation, as well as reverse engineered by scientists and scholars. Yale and MIT both have teams exploring the burgeoning field of letterlocking.

Museums are discovering treasure troves of letterlocked messages by going directly to the source: post offices. A cache of 600 undelivered letters in the Netherlands, for instance, are being analyzed by researchers.

trianglelock

[Image courtesy of Atlas Obscura.]

It’s a remarkable thing, really, this union of centuries-old skills with twenty-first century knowledge. These are puzzles, frozen in time, waiting to be solved and placed into the larger picture of history.

Letterlocking is nothing less than a rare and beautiful art combining puzzles and privacy, as elegant as it is clever. There are no doubt many more secrets to be found behind the folds, slits, and wax seals of these lovingly crafted messages.

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A Relatively Modern Idea: Fairness in Dice Rolling

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[Image courtesy of Larsdatter.com.]

This may come as a surprise to you, fellow puzzlers, but fairness was not always a priority when it came to rolling dice.

Nowadays, whether you’re going after that elusive Yahtzee, hoping for doubles to earn another roll in Monopoly, or trying to roll sevens in a game of craps, the basic concept behind throwing dice is that every outcome of a six-sided die has an equal chance to appear. Unless you’re dealing with loaded or gimmicked dice, your odds should be 1 in 6.

But a recent study by researchers from the American Museum of Natural History and the University of California, Davis, has revealed that fairness in dice rolling didn’t really become a concern for dice users until the Renaissance. Researchers gathered dice spanning 2000 years of human history to explore why this was the case.

[Image courtesy of Wikipedia.]

From an article on Science Alert:

Roman-era dice, the researchers found, were a mess when it came to shape. They were made from a variety of materials, such as metal, bone and clay, and no two were shaped entirely alike. Many were visibly lumpy and lopsided, with the 1 and 6 on opposite sides that were more likely to roll up.

In fact, it seems like variety was the name of the game in Roman times, since the number configurations, shape, and size were inconsistent across the board, although dice were fairly common in the time period.

[Image courtesy of Pinterest.]

The Dark Ages led to a downturn in dice frequency, as they become very rare between the years 400CE and 1100CE.

The use of dice rebounds after 1100, and are most commonly found in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt in what is known as the primes configuration, meaning that opposite numbers add up to prime numbers. 1 pairs with 2, 3 pairs with 4, and 5 pairs with 6.

There was a reinvigorated focus on the mechanics of chance and calculating probability, thanks to names like Galileo and Pascal, as well as a spirit of greater scientific understanding overall. Those Renaissance influences led to both a standardized shape for dice and a change in the numbering system. At this point, most dice convert to the sevens configuration, where opposite sides add up to seven (1 pairs with 6, 2 pairs with 5, and 3 pairs with 4).

[Image courtesy of Smithsonian.com.]

And according to lead researcher Jelmer Eerkens, cheating may have been on the mind of manufacturers going forward. “Standardizing the attributes of a die, like symmetry and the arrangement of numbers, may have been one method to decrease the likelihood that an unscrupulous player had manipulated the dice to change the odds of a particular roll.”

That change from variable shapes, sizes, and designs reflects a sea change in thinking towards dice and chance. Before, the shape didn’t matter because the results were attributed to Fate or some greater outside force, but later on, an understanding of chance and probability pushed standardization of dice forward.

In the end, it’s amazing how much of our culture and worldview, both past and present, can be revealed by exploring how we solve puzzles and play games.

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These anagrams are out of this world!

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Planets are in the news, as Pluto’s dubious planetary status is under the microscope once again.

Recently, a debate over the defining qualities of a planet was held at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and three of the top names in planetary science presented their cases to the attending audience.

Now, although the audience overwhelmingly voted in favor of Pluto’s planethood, that’s not binding. This wasn’t an International Astronomical Union vote or anything like that.

But it did put the solar system back in the news cycle, and that reminded me of a puzzly planetary story.

In the 1600s, Galileo Galilei was doing amazing work with his telescope, redefining our understanding of the solar system and our place in it. He was doing controversial work, but he still wanted to be able to prove he was the primary person behind a given discovery, so he mailed a letter to his colleague, Johannes Kepler.

Galileo sent Kepler this anagram: s m a i s m r m i l m e p o e t a l e u m i b u n e n u g t t a u i r a s

When properly solved, the anagram reads “Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi,” meaning “I have observed the most distant planet to have a triple form.” You see, Galileo had glimpsed Saturn and its famous rings, but due to the poor magnification of his telescope, he’d mistaken the rings themselves for two moons orbiting the planet.

This was a tremendous discovery, adding to our knowledge of what was (at the time) the furthest reaches of our solar system.

But Kepler, while trying to untangle the anagram, came to a different solution. Believing that Galileo’s latest discovery involved Mars, not Saturn, Kepler’s solution read “Salue umbistineum geminatum Martia proles,” meaning Mars has two moons. (The ambiguity of Latin V’s and U’s didn’t help matters.)

So, while Kepler was wrong in his solution, he was unintentionally correct about Mars! (Phobos and Deimos, the two moons of Mars, wouldn’t be confirmed until 1877.)

Amazingly enough, this wouldn’t be the only time Galileo relied on Kepler and anagrams to prove provenance when it came to his discoveries.

In 1611, Galileo sent another anagram to Kepler: Haec immatura a me iam frustra leguntur o.y.

Properly unscrambled, the message reads “Cynthiae figuras aemulatur mater amorum,” or “The mother of love imitates the shape of Cynthia.” This one requires a little more explanation. The mother of love was Venus, and Cynthia was the Moon, meaning that Venus, when observed from Earth, has phases just like the moon.

[Click here for a larger version of this image.]

This probably sounds less important than Galileo’s studies of Saturn, but it’s not. This was an earthshaking discovery, because it was observable evidence that Venus had to pass on both sides of the sun, meaning that Venus orbited the sun. This violated the geocentric model of the solar system so strongly espoused by the church!

It was evidence like this that led to Galileo’s battle with the Inquisition.

And, weirdly enough, there might be one more twist to this story.

Some historians believe that Kepler also solved this Galilean anagram incorrectly, and that his solution once again revealed an unintentional discovery about the solar system.

According to the as-yet-unverified story, Kepler’s solution read “Macula rufa in Jove est gyratur mathem…,” which translates as “There is a red spot in Jupiter, which rotates mathem[atically].” (Again, yes, there’s the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, but there was no way for Kepler to have known that at the time.)

It’s hard to believe that Kepler could twice unravel a Galileo anagram and twice make accidental predictions about the solar system. While the first story is widely accepted, the second is viewed with far more skepticism.

But either way, it just goes to show that anagrams, while delightful, might not be the best method for announcing your great discoveries.

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