Famous codes and ciphers

In July 1897 Edward Elgar, then a forty-year-old music teacher not yet famous as a composer, stayed with the Penny family in Wolverhampton. On 14 July his wife Alice wrote to thank them, and Elgar slipped in a note for Dora Penny, written in looping symbols. Dora never read it. Two years later Elgar named the tenth of his Enigma Variations, "Dorabella", after her.

The note is 87 characters on three lines, built from about 24 different symbols, each one, two or three small semicircles facing one of eight directions. Dora kept it in a drawer for forty years and published it in her 1937 memoir, Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation. The original has since been lost, so every attempt works from that reproduction.

Elgar used the same kind of symbols elsewhere, and many solutions have been offered, including one by the musicologist Eric Sams in 1970. None has been accepted. At 87 characters it's short, which lets almost any key produce something that looks like English, the same problem as the Zodiac's short ciphers.

Most famous ciphers share three things: a story worth telling, a text short enough to print, and no confirmed answer, or an answer that took a very long time. Kryptos had a sculptor teasing clues for decades, the Zodiac ciphers came from a killer writing to newspapers, and the Beale ciphers came with a buried treasure. The Voynich manuscript is the exception: a whole book, and the story is simply that nobody can read it.

If you want to try one, the cipher identifier is a good first step for any unknown cipher, and StringMash Daily has a smaller one to solve every day.