Horst Happenings....: Can You Spot It?

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Can You Spot It?

You may remember from an earlier post that Julie and I went to the public library here in town. One of the books that I checked out was Hidden Secrets by David Owen & Antonio J. Mendez. The book is "A complete history of espionage and the technology used to support it", so says the cover. Thus far I have found it to be a very good read.

The one thing that bothers me about this book and many others is when I come across a typo, more specifically, a misspelled word. It seems that you can run across this type of error or mistake quite often today because of people using a "spell check" program. It seems that the program will only catch misspelled words; not words that are normally spelled correctly but are absolutely wrong for where they are used. I have found several of those, but for the sake of time I will not be mentioning them now. After all, I'm hungry and I want to go have breakfast.

However, I can't believe what I saw last night in the book. On page 103 there is a picture of the German Enigma machine which was used for ciphering and deciphering messages sent to the various units in the field. Look at the picture closely. Do you see what I saw?

Can't see it yet? Perhaps it is a little small. Try this one.

That's a little better but still a little hard to see. How about this one?

That's better. Now look at the rows of keys (Bottom 3 rows) and lights (Top 3 rows). Pay particular attention to the letters on them. They are reversed. This is easy to see on the keys for the letters J, K, and F for instance. Now that would really make a cipher wouldn't it?

Look back at the first picture. Apparently the publishers reversed or flipped the picture in order to have it fit the layout of the page.

Interesting the things that publishers do and many people never notice.

For a little fun try this link to the Enigma Machine Applet. Here you can create your own coded messages just like the spies did.