An Englishman of noble birth, Sir Francis Bacon developed many revolutionary works, and a clever cipher to hide both his identity and important messages to those with whom he associated.

His Life

Born to Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Seals for Queen Elizabeth I, in 1561, he found himself a noble by birth. The death of his father, when Francis was merely 18 years old left him nearly penniless and drew him towards politics and law where he found himself aged 23 years old a member of the House of Commons. His career truly began when James I came into power, as Elizabeth I had never trusted Bacon. He rose to the rank of Lord Chancellor of England, and began pursuing his interest in writing¹. Becoming highly opinionated about Aristotlism, Scholasticism and New Renaissance Humanism at an early age, he began to pursue alternatives to these particular philosophies. His opposition to these three philosophies can be found in his works, the most notable being:

• Colours of Good and Evil (1597)
• Meditationes Sacrae (1597) - Sacred Meditations
• The Advancement of Learning (1605)
• Novum Organum² (1620) - Implement Revolutions
• Historia Ventorum (1622) - A History of Wind
• Historia Vitae et Mortis (1622) - A History of Life and Death
• Instauratio Magna (1623) - Great Restoration
• Apothegms (1624) - Philosophical Musings

He died 9 April, 1626, from pneumonia, after engaging in a meat preserving experiment, brought on by a revelation about snow.

The Baconian Cipher

Not so much a cipher as steganography³, Sir Francis Bacon devised the aptly named 'Baconian Cipher', to not encrypt the content of his messages, but disguise messages in the way in which another text (often called a covertext) is written. An encoded message 'Hello' could look similar to this:

I extend my hand in welcome to you
or
I eXTEnd My haNd In wElComE To You

Difficult to comprehend, a very well thought out form of steganography. To encode such a message, we will need the following letter equivalents:

It seems somewhat confusing, which it is of course intended to be⁴.

However, if we examine each value of letters, there is only A or B⁵. These are used to denote two different types of text, be it size, italic, colour, or anything else. Therefore to encode a message, we simply need to break up some text into sections of 5 (as the cipher values work with 5 characters each).

Staying with the original example:

I extend my hand in welcome to you
I exte / nd my h / and in / welco / me to y / ou

Now that we have 5 different sections, we can set up our encoded message 'Hello' by aligning text with each value we want:

I exte / nd my h / and in / welco / me to y / ou
a abbb / aa ba a / aba ba / ababa / ab ba b / __

The last two letters dont fit into the cipher, therefor they are superfluous to the message. Now that we have the values for each letter, we can use one of many representations for them.

In this example, we use regular text for 'A' and italic text for 'B'. With this, the text will be encoded to:

I extend my hand in welcome to you
I extend my hand in welcome to you

This text is difficult to differentiate from its uncoded version, making it an essentially unrecognisable cipher.

Reverting from its original form proves to be somewhat the same, as you simply reverse the steps. Find which are the regular characters, and which are different, and compare them to the value chart.

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¹ Some sceptical researchers believe Sir Francis Bacon to have written many amazing compositions under the moniker 'Shakespeare'. The authorship question however remains under research, in the meantime being attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford.
² One of two parts of the unfinished work Instauratio Magna.
³ Greek for 'hidden or concealed writing' - hiding messages within text, pictures or other things.
⁴ In general, ciphers are notorious for being complex and very difficult to decode without any grounds on which to begin. However, there are some ciphers that are relatively easy to decrypt, especially with modern computers.
⁵ Somewhat similar to the binary language used in the design of computers.