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The original was posted on /r/unresolvedmysteries by /u/TapirTrouble on 2023-12-31 21:56:02+00:00.
This may be of interest to people who like historical mysteries and cryptography. I know that there have been some posts about codes on this subreddit -- I didn't know about this particular code and I thought it might be useful to another reader someday.
An antique dress collector in Maine bought a silk dress in 2013 that had a couple of sheets of paper hidden in a secret pocket. (I didn't know that this could be a feature in 1800s dresses, but it makes sense to me, that a woman back then might have wanted a pocket like that. As it is now, women's outfits often don't have enough pockets -- don't get me started!)
On the paper were a bunch of phrases like "'Bismark Omit leafage buck bank". The dress collector was able to identify this as probably being a "telegraph code" from that period. As the CBC article below notes: "Thousands of codes were developed that allowed a word, a phrase or a sentence to be represented by a single code word. It didn't just make messages shorter and cheaper to send, it was also secure. Unless you had the right code, the messages would simply appear as a random string of words, even as they passed through many hands."
(Another thing -- it might also make memorizing a particular message easier, like What3words co-ordinates -- though that's from this century.)
What I thought was especially interesting was that the dress collector, who is also an archaeologist, was able to narrow down the time period when the dress was made to the 1880s. That helped Wayne Chan, who works at the U of Manitoba, eliminate some potential leads. (For example, it wouldn't have been a US Civil War situation.) The NOAA archives were able to confirm that it was a U.S. Signals Service Weather Code, and that the words are encoding information on dates and weather conditions for various places in the central part of the continent. Thanks to the American taxpayers for supporting the NOAA with enough resources to be able to maintain and access records like this.
More information: