User:PeterBrooks/Sandbox

PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS A SANDBOX ENTRY, NOT A LIVE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE, UNDERGOING EXPANSION AND IMPROVEMENT

I don't mind helpful edits to my work here, but please make sure your contribution is positive and constructive. Thanks AncientBrit (talk) 06:56, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

The enciphered letter (claimed non-free image removed by DASHbot)

The Dorabella Cipher is an enciphered note written by Edward Elgar to Miss Dora Penny (a family friend), which accompanied a letter from Elgar's wife (Caroline Alice Elgar née Roberts) to Dora's stepmother (Mary Frances Penny née Baker), and was dated July 14, 1897. Dora was never able to decipher it and its meaning remains unknown to this day.

The cipher, consisting of 87 characters spread over 3 lines, appears to be composed of an alphabet of 24 symbols, with each symbol consisting of either 1, 2, or 3 approximate semicircles or cusps, oriented in one of 8 directions.

Such a cipher can be mapped to a reduced alphabet (the following example is taken from a page in a notebook owned and annotated by Elgar in the 1920s reproduced by Eric Sams in previously unpublished work made available online by the Sams family through the efforts of Direttore Erik Battaglia of the CENTRO STUDI ERIC SAMS at http://ericsams.org):

The cipher symbol set

The orientation of a number of the characters in the note is ambiguous. A small dot, meaning and significance unknown, appears after the fifth character on the third line.

An analysis of the distribution of the 87 characters reveals a symbol frequency (insert Friedman's IC value together with the value for plain English for comparison; consider including a brief overview of Friedman's IC values for different languages for comparison) very close to what would be expected if the cipher was a simple substitution cipher, based on a plain text in English, but attempts to decipher it along these lines have so far proved fruitless, leading to speculation that the cipher may be more complex.

Background to Elgar’s cryptic note

Dora Penny was the daughter of the Reverend Penny of Wolverhampton. Her mother had died in Melanesia (Verify that this is true; some accounts say that Reverend Penny traveled to Melanesia after his wife's death) while her father was working as a missionary. Dora’s father remarried and Dora’s stepmother was a friend of Alice Elgar (Edward's wife).

Consider rephrasing: In 1897, the Penny... for a few days in early July. The chances are that the arrangements would have been made well in advance, since the cipher is dated July 14 and that was after the Elgars returned home. In July 1897, the Penny family invited Edward and Alice Elgar to stay at the Wolverhampton Rectory for a few days.

Edward Elgar was a forty-two year old music teacher who had yet to become a successful composer. Dora Penny was twenty years his junior. Edward and Dora liked one another and remained friends for the rest of the composer’s life. Elgar named Variation 10 of his 1899 Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma) ‘Dorabella,’ in dedication to Dora Penny.

Returning to Great Malvern, Alice wrote a letter of thanks to the Penny family on 14 July 1897. Edward Elgar inserted a separate note with cryptic writing on one side and the name 'Miss Penny' on the reverse.

Do we know that this is true? It sounds like editorializing. This note lay in a drawer for forty years and became generally known when Dora had it reproduced in her memoirs: Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation, by Mrs. Richard Powell (Dora's married name), first published by Oxford University Press in 1937 and then again by Methuen, London, in 1949. Subsequently the original note (and the accompanying letter) was mislaid.

Dora claimed that she had never been able to read the note, which she assumed to be a cipher message. In a later edition of her book she claimed in a note dated September 1946:

Since the first edition of this book appeared, the cipher has, I know, been examined by a good many people skilled in such matters. Nobody, so far as I am aware, has yet succeeded in reading it.

Dr Kevin Jones, Emeritus Professor of Music at Kingston University, proposed this explanation:

Dora's father had just returned from Melanesia where he had been a missionary for many years. Fascinated by local language and culture, he possessed a few traditional talismans decorated with arcane glyphs. Perhaps such an item surfaced as a conversation piece during the Elgar's week in Wolverhampton? And if Dora recalled this when writing her memoirs, it might account for the fact the coded message was referred to as an 'inscription' when communicating with the director of SOAS many years later.

Elgar was known to be interested in ciphers. The Elgar Birthplace Museum preserves four articles from The Pall Mall Magazine of 1896 entitled Secrets in Cipher. There is also a wooden box which Elgar painted with his solution to a cipher that the fourth magazine article averred to be insoluble – a so-called Nihilist cipher.

One reason for continuing interest in the cryptic note is that it is a celebrity cipher which is famous for being famous. It is from the pen of the man who wrote Pomp and Circumstance and whose head appeared on the British twenty pound note. Could there be a connection between Dorabella and the mystery of the Enigma Variation’s original theme?

Dorabella cracked

Note for action: This section needs to be expanded considerably to incorporate Sams' reasoning behind his choice of interpretation - for example, the determination that "TT" should be interpreted as π and therefore pronounced "pi". The heading needs to be rethought too. In addition, space needs to be given to Beatrice V. Gwynn and her proposed solution

Eric Sams, the musicologist, proposed a decryption of Dorabella in 1970. His intermediate interpretation of the message is this:

STARTS. LARKS! IT’S EXOTIC BIT A CLOK OBSCURC MY NEW LETTEE AB BELOW. I OIN THE WARK MAKES E.E. SIGH WHEN E ARE TOO LOMMONT.

The length of this text is 109 letters, whereas the original text contains only 87 symbols. Sams contended that some words are implied by phonetic shorthand.

Javier Atance has suggested a solution to the mystery. It is not a text but a melody.

The 8 different positions of the semicircles turning clockwise correspond to different musical notes: position 1=do, position 2=re, position 3=mi, position 4=fa, position 5=sol, position 6=la, position 7=si, position 8=do. Each semicircle has 3 different levels corresponding to natural, flat or sharp notes.

Recent attempts at cracking Dorabella

The Elgar Society advertised a Dorabella Cipher Competition in 2007 to mark the 150th anniversary of Elgar’s birth. A number of entries were received but none were found to be satisfactory. Dorabella is a puzzle without a solution, and is likely to remain so.

The last sentence is somewhat judgemental in the absence of evidence to support the claim; needs rewriting to provide a different tone of voice.

Evidence from Elgar's own notes

Eric Sams (see also above) in a previously unpublished document currently available on the World Wide Web not only discussed his view of the nature of the cipher's symbols, but also included an Appendix (labeled [d]) at the bottom of the Web page, in which he provided a copy of one page (or possibly two facing pages) from an exercise book belonging to Elgar, created in the late 1920s - certainly many years after the cryptic message was sent. A somewhat clearer PDF of the article is also available through that site.

In the sample page(s) from the exercise book it is possible to see that Elgar explored not only the curvilinear form of the cipher symbol set, but also a rectilinear form.

Also plainly in evidence are several arrangements of the cipher symbols, including one specific instance in which Elgar not only mapped the symbols to an alphabet but also demonstrated the use of "letter doubling" in order to fit a 26 letter English alphabet into a 24 symbol cipher set: I and J are represented by a single symbol, as are U and V. Other arrangements of the sequence of symbols appear on the page(s) and are not explicitly mapped to an alphabet but appear to follow rules of thumb as to their sequence.

In addition there are examples of phrases that were encrypted by Elgar. Using one of the mappings (the only one explicitly expressed on the page(s) with a matching alphabet) it is possible to decipher these examples to read: MARCO ELGAR (Elgar had a dog called Marco), A VERY OLD CYPHER and DO YOU GO TO LONDON.

The latter phrase also appears in plain text with TOMORROW appended to it. This sentence has been annotated to show the total number of letters (23) and one specific vowel count: "9 Os". Each letter in the plain text has been ticked either above or below the line, according to whether it is a letter "O". The significance of the focus on the one vowel has not been determined.

The encrypted phrase A VERY OLD CYPHER appears twice: once using the curvilinear form of the symbols and once using the rectilinear. To date only the curvilinear form has been found in use.

Two other sets of items appear on the same page(s). One consists of the numerals 1 2 3 4 4 in which the "4" is written in two slightly different forms - one "closed" and one "open".

The other set consists of what can best be described as icons. The first two are simply a rectangle and a circle containing a single cross in each.

The remaining four are more interesting. Generally circular, they resemble "hairy footballs" and are of two different types. Three possess "bristles" - lines pointing outwards from the circumference - while one has the lines pointing inwards.

A stylized representation of the "hairy footballs"

They are all essentially circles with a single cross inside. However, each arm of each cross also has "bristles". Each set of bristles numbers three for each arc of the circumference or arm of the cross, making eight groups of three per icon, and for each group of three bristles all face in the same direction (inward/outward or clock/anti-clock).

The nature of these icons is not yet known for certain, but there is speculation that they may be mnemonics - a method of describing the sequence of cipher symbols in groups of three, to be mapped to a particular arrangement of an alphabet. This would be one way of innocuously recording somewhere in a document the specific mapping used for a particular representation of text in cipher form; Elgar was well-known for doodling on his papers so such objects would not have appeared out of place.

To date no specific information about the icons has been uncovered and they have not yet been seen in use outside the exercise book.

Simple analysis

An examination of the variety of curvilinear symbols used in the message sent to Dora reveals that only 20 out of the possible 24 symbols are actually employed. If the specific mapping of symbols to alphabet shown in Elgar's exercise book is applied to the message, the result is apparent gibberish. The cipher is also open to interpretation: a number of the symbols (both in the message and on the pages of the exercise book) are sufficiently badly drawn that they are ambiguous.

The range of possible interpretations is very limited; each ambiguous symbol is capable of being interpreted as only one of two possible alternatives. Nevertheless the noise introduced into the message just from this aspect alone complicates approaches to decryption.

An analysis of the respective frequencies of occurrence for each symbol used in the message can be made, yielding a ranked list of decreasing frequencies.

When this ranked list is mapped to a similarly ranked list of letters used in plain English text (the ETAOIN SHRDLU sequence, of which there are many, and which vary according to the moment in history from which they arise, the subject matter to which they pertain, and the quantity of text from which they are derived), the result is still apparent gibberish.

Yet a calculation of the Friedman Index of Coincidence, while not statistically significant (because of the paucity of data), hints that the message is a simple substitution cipher of English text.

It is possible therefore that the message has been subject to at least one additional process (possibly steganographic) in which the letters have been re-arranged according to a predetermined sequence.

Such a process would retain the same value for the index of coincidence yet conceal the correct sequence of letters, and yield only apparent gibberish.

This, coupled with the ambiguities in transcription and possibly complicated still further by mapping errors made by Elgar as he converted from text to symbols, probably explains why the cipher remains unbroken.

Other instances of use

While most attention has been focussed on the note sent to Dora Penny, at least two other instances of Elgar's use of his cipher are known.

The Liszt Programme

The same type of symbols appear on a music programme belonging to Elgar, dating from 1886.

Note for action: insert stylized graphic of the fragment as well as a reference to the website currently hosting the fragment (tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Elgar-Cipher/files/Liszt-world.jpg). Need to find another source since that site is restricted.

Elgar wrote a sequence of 18 cipher symbols in a column of printed programme notes for a concert he attended at Crystal Palace on 10 April 1886 - opposite a musical example from Liszt's "Les Preludes".

A copy is held at the Elgar Birthplace Museum, and its existence is also noted by Jerrold Northrop Moore in his book Edward Elgar: A Creative Life, first published by Oxford University Press in 1984.

On page 114 of his book Moore comments that the Liszt fragment (as it has been referred to in recent years) was decoded to be "GETS YOU TO JOY AND HYSTERIOUS" - as communicated to him by Anthony Thorley in 1977.

Note for action: I contacted Anthony Thorley who says he intends to publish a wealth of additional research when he can find time

Note for action: determine whether Tim's proposed decryption qualifies for inclusion (get academic status plus reference to his cryptology website)

The COURAGE Card Set

Elgar successfully decrypted a supposedly uncrackable code challenge set by ?the editor? of Pall Mall Magazine (viii/36 (April 1896), 618 ?date? and wrote out the steps to the solution on a set of nine cards. The set is currently held at the Elgar Birthplace Museum.

Professor Jones mentions in his BBC article that at the top of the first card Elgar had written a number of symbols using his cipher set. There were ten in total: eight comprised the full set of rotations of the triple cusp symbol, and the remaining two comprised a double cusp and a single cusp, both described as "upright".

Note for action: see if anyone can provide more details and even a picture - Mike C, maybe?

External links

• http://www.elgarfoundation.org/
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2007/interact/puzzles/variations.shtml
• Dunin, Elonka, 2006, The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms, ISBN 0-7867-1726-2 (contains an image of the cipher)