Walter A Wood was a large scale manufacturer of Agricultural Equipment located in Hoosick Falls, NY – a small town between Albany and the Vermont border. Although his business began local, it was eventually an international operation. The NYSHA library has a large and comprehensive collection of catalogs, broadsides, parts lists and circulars for Wood’s company. The Farmers’ Museum also has several pieces of Wood equipment in the collection.
In scanning one of the parts catalogs I discovered that each part had its own telegraph cipher. Perhaps I have been reading too many murder mystery novels, but my first thought about this cipher systems was related to German spies. I thought “Did the US government not want Germany to know where all of our grain was grown, so they directied these manufacturers to encode their ordering system?”
There are a number of problems with this conspiracy-theory, not the least of which are that the codes are printed in a readily available catalog and 1906 is too early to be worrying about German spies.
My next thought was “DATA PLAN”! It might sound a bit random, but stick with me. If you’ve owned a smartphone—or tried upgrading one recently—you’ve probably noticed that just about every device comes ready to connect to the internet. And, of course, that means you’re paying for the data you use on your mobile network.
Back in the day, I used to QA landing pages for a comparison website—you know, the kind where you’d wybierzesz dobre kasyno online według opinii. Half of my job was making sure those pages loaded in under 500KB, even on a sluggish 3G connection.
Then it hit me: those old telegraph cipher codes were basically the original data-saving hacks. They were clever little ways to cut down on how much info you needed to send when ordering replacement parts over the wire.
Link (via Adam Flynn)