What did the Beale Cipher 2 Key Look Like?

[chalkoutline]

The 1885 pamphlet explains that Thomas Beale gave the ciphers to Robert Morris in a locked iron box and the KEY to those ciphers to a person in St. Louis. So what did the KEY look like?

To answer this question one must understand how the key was made. After Thomas Beale numbered the Declaration of Independence (DOI), he couldn’t just give the numbered DOI to that person but would have converted it to a smaller document that could be mailed to Robert Morris in the event of Thomas Beale’s death.

To do this he would have created a table with 26 columns where he put the letter of the alphabet at the top of each column. He would then go through the DOI finding all the numbers associated with A and copy them into the A column. He would continue this process for B to Z.

I have attached what I think the KEY looked like. It was during this effort that Thomas Beale copied numbers into the wrong column as shown with Red arrows. This is also when Thomas Beale assigned the number 1005 to the letter “X” and the number 811 to the letter “X”.

The numbers highlighted in BLUE are those letters used in the Cipher 2 message.

How fortunate are we that Robert Morriss was given the ciphers and not the KEY because no one would be able to reverse engineer the Cipher 2 message using the KEY!

 

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[Lestrada]

Interesting, but why does your key include all those unused numbers ?

Why not enclose in the mail the numbered DOI ? , It would surely fit if written on both sides of a single sheet of paper.

Why not, for example simply, briefly explain the method and give the details of the key_document(s) and where to start counting from ?
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Beale Ciphers Key Example.1)

Find the named document,
then count the words in the named document,
when the number of the named document word matches the number in the paper write down the 1st letter of the named document word.

Paper1 - Some_Book by Some_Author, publication date. Count from 'Some_text'.
Paper2 - The preamble to the Declaration of independence. Count from "When in the course".
Paper3 - Some_Book by Some_Author, publication date. Count from 'Some_text'.

Note: The details can be argued but this is just a general description of one method to create a Beale ciphers key.
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[chalkoutline]

Interesting, but why does your key include all those unused numbers ?

Why not enclose in the mail the numbered DOI ? , It would surely fit if written on both sides of a single sheet of paper.

Why not, for example simply, briefly explain the method and give the details of the key_document(s) and where to start counting from ?
==========
Beale Ciphers Key Example.1)

Find the named document,
then count the words in the named document,
when the number of the named document word matches the number in the paper write down the 1st letter of the named document word.

Paper1 - Some_Book by Some_Author, publication date. Count from 'Some_text'.
Paper2 - The preamble to the Declaration of independence. Count from "When in the course".
Paper3 - Some_Book by Some_Author, publication date. Count from 'Some_text'.

Note: The details can be argued but this is just a general description of one method to create a Beale ciphers key.
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My Cipher 2 KEY includes all the numbers used to number the Declaration of Independence (DOI), both used and unused numbers because that what Thomas Beale would have started with. He would then have arbitrarily assigned numbers from the KEY to the corresponding letter in his message: 115, 73, 24, 807, etc. The numbers in yesterday's KEY that are highlighted in BLUE are those he assigned. So you can see he had many ways to create the final cipher of the message. However, you are right that the final key that ended in the St. Louis letter would have only had the assigned numbers.

For a simple substitution cipher, the cipher has numbers 115, 73, 24, 807 and the KEY is a the relation between letters and numbers: I=115, H=73, A=24, V=807. I was just pointing out that a table format would make the better format for the KEY.