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Jeffery Kurz' article for salon.com on the Poe Challenge & ensuing discussions ...

The Challenge Cryptograph
Is this W.B. Tyler's cipher or Poe's? Solving it may help unravel this 150 year-old mystery.

Load Large Graphic: 496,142 bytes

The Story:

Edgar Allan Poe [1809-1849] had a fascination with cryptography. Besides numerous references to secret writings in some of his poems and stories such as The Gold-Bug, he conducted his own "cryptographic challenge" that was published in Alexander's Weekly Messenger beginning in December, 1839. For this series of articles Poe challenged his readers to submit their cryptographs to him, asserting that he would solve them all. For the next six months Poe published solutions to the ciphers submitted by his readers, and shared his views on the nature of cryptography.

Poe's association with the Messenger ended in May, 1840, but he took up the subject approximately a year later in an article he wrote for Graham's Magazine entitled "A Few Words on Secret Writing". In this article, and in the three addenda which followed, he claimed to have solved all of the approximately one hundred (legitimate) ciphers received by the Messenger, and further expounded his views on the subject of cryptography. It was during this time that one of Poe's readers, a Mr. W. B. Tyler, submitted the two cryptographs shown on this page.

Poe never published solutions to Tyler's cryptographs. This fact alone makes them interesting - of the 100-plus cryptographs submitted by his readers, these are the only two not solved. Poe claimed that he did not have the time to work out their solution, but published them in Graham's for his readers to decipher. However, the most interesting aspect of these cryptographs is the possibility that they were not written by W. B. Tyler, but by Poe himself.

There is only circumstantial evidence to corroborate the theory that Tyler was Poe's nom de plume. This proposition was first advanced by Louis Renza in an essay titled "Poe's Secret Autobiography", and more recently by Shawn Rosenheim in his book "The Cryptographic Imagination" (buy it in hardcover or paperback). The solution of the Tyler cryptographs may help prove (or, disprove) this theory.

The figure to the left is the challenge cipher; the second of the two cryptographs allegedly sent from Mr. W.B. Tyler to Edgar Allan Poe. It was originally published in Graham's in December, 1841. The first of Tyler's cryptographs (shown below) was solved by Terence Whalen (web page?) in 1992. This cryptograph is a monoalphabetic substitution cipher, and is believed to be considerably simpler than the challenge cipher.

While Poe's cryptographs have attracted the attention of some exceptional cryptographers (e.g. William Friedman) for years, there have been no known attempts to solve Tyler's cryptographs until recently. 

Tyler's First Cryptograph
Solved by Terence Whalen in 1992.

The Solution:

Terence Whalen solved Tyler's first cryptograph as follows:

"The soul secure in her existence smiles at the drawn dagger and defies its point. The stars shall fade away, the sun himself grow dim with age and nature sink in years, but thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, unhurt amid the war of elements, the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds."

According to Rosenheim's account in "The Cryptographic Imagination" Whalen's solution proceeded from recognition that the three-character pattern of "comma-dagger-section symbol", repeated seven times in eight lines, most likely represented the word "the" or "and". It turned out to be "the". Another clue was taken from Tyler's correspondence to Poe in which he discussed the difficulty of deciphering text that was written backwards ("eht", rather than "the"), and spaces and punctuation are omitted.

Rules for the Poe Cryptographic Challenge:

1. The contest winner shall be determined by the first correct solution to the challenge cryptograph shown above. (Note: A larger version of the cryptograph may be downloaded by clicking here.)
2. A panel of judges will be solely responsible for determining the contest winner. The panel of judges is:

• Shawn Rosenheim, Professor of English - Williams College, Williamstown, MA
• Stephen Rachman, Professor of English - Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI
• William Lenhart, Professor of Mathematics - Williams College, Williamstown, MA

3. Proposed solutions shall be submitted by email (--CLOSED--@bokler.com), and by fax to 256-883-XXXX. (Sorry, these have turned into spam magnets.)
4. In the event that two or more correct solutions are received, the contest winner shall be based on the first entry received by fax. The order and the date and time of entry will be based on the receipt of a correct solution by fax, not by email.
5. Submission of an entry constitutes the contestant's agreement and permission to publication of that entry in this forum. Requests for anonymity will be honored to the extent possible consistent with the award of the prizes.

Poe-Related Links:

The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore maintains a website documenting many items of historical importance concerning Poe's life and death. This site contains a brief section on Poe's cryptographic interests, and some references. They are also the source of the Poe graphic used at the top of this page.

The Legend of Poe the Cryptographer by Daniel W. Dukes is part of the online collection of material on Poe published as The Poe Perplex by the US Naval Academy. This page is particularly relevant to the Poe Cryptographic Challenge.

The Dauphin County Library's page on Edgar Allan Poe provides links to some of the better Poe sites on the WWW.

Edgar Allan Poe's House of Usher website is one of the more extensive sources of online information.

The Poe Decoder site contains essays on Poe's work, and links to other sources for information on Poe.