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Authors: David Kahn
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and Factory Installations, and completed his studies in March 1903. The following year he finished his dissertation, “Proposal for the Construction of an Indirect Water Turbine Governor,” which was accepted. At the age of twenty-five, he was granted a doctorate in engineering.
Scherbius worked for several of Germany’s major electrical firms and for a large Swiss electrical firm. He made his first invention, a high-voltage drive motor designed to handle sudden changes of stress, for the Swiss company. In 1918, he and E. Richard Ritter, the certified engineer mentioned in his first letter to the navy, founded the firm of Scherbius & Ritter. As a partner in it, he continued to invent (electric pillows, ceramic heating parts, and asynchronous motors, among others), research (problems of high-tension direct current and temperature control), and publish. He wrote articles on such subjects as a shunt phase compensator and a ninety-one-page pamphlet on magnetic induction in closed coils. His name became enshrined in the field with the Scherbius principle for asynchronous motors.
It was probably World War I that made Scherbius succumb to the bacillus of cryptography. Yet that science was underdeveloped in German-speaking lands. The most recent comprehensive text in German dated from 1881, more than forty years before, and the author had had to publish it himself. The German and Austrian literature after that time consisted of a handful of scholarly historical articles and books, a few survey articles in scattered magazines, pamphlets telling how to shield love letters and telephone conversationsfrom pryers, a booklet overview of elementary ciphers intended for businessmen, and studies of cable secrecy and codes. A few dozen cipher devices had been patented in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, but they had merely mechanized systems that were hundreds of years old.
Perhaps the greatest activity, and that not very intense, was manifest in the publication in German of commercial codes. These thick books, sometimes produced privately for a firm, sometimes published for general sale, replaced business and personal phrases with codewords. “Do not exceed limit,” for example, might become JIWUL. Their chief purpose was to economize on cable tolls. But they did provide some secrecy, they were constructed in the same way as many secret governmental codes, and they had the word “code” in their titles, all of which brought them into the purview of cryptology. The codewords, sometimes taken from real languages, sometimes made up, were always “pronounceable,” because international telegraph regulations set lower rates for pronounceable codewords than for unpronounceable ones or for codenumbers.
Scherbius’s first cryptographic device sought to maintain this economy while making these mostly nonsecret messages secret. It enciphered codenumbers into pronounceable codewords by replacing the successive digits alternately with vowels and consonants. One of the first cipher mechanisms to employ electricity, it passed the input impulses through “multiple switch boards which connect each arriving lead with one of the outgoing leads and which are adapted to interchange this connection with great facility of variation.”
These switchboards formed the germ of the rotor. That concept may have come to Scherbius while he was at a concert, as his best ideas often did. He was said to be very musical, but his mind apparently wandered frequently from the melody, for he often jotted ideas and made calculations on his cuffs while the orchestra played. His first rotor enciphered numbers, presumably codenumbers, gaining security but losing pronounceability.
A rotor for letters followed, and it was this device that Scherbius submitted to the navy and the Foreign Office in the spring of 1918. That both rejected his machine did not diminish his confidence in it. He turned to the commercial market.
Scherbius & Ritter transferred the cipher patent
Scherbius worked for several of Germany’s major electrical firms and for a large Swiss electrical firm. He made his first invention, a high-voltage drive motor designed to handle sudden changes of stress, for the Swiss company. In 1918, he and E. Richard Ritter, the certified engineer mentioned in his first letter to the navy, founded the firm of Scherbius & Ritter. As a partner in it, he continued to invent (electric pillows, ceramic heating parts, and asynchronous motors, among others), research (problems of high-tension direct current and temperature control), and publish. He wrote articles on such subjects as a shunt phase compensator and a ninety-one-page pamphlet on magnetic induction in closed coils. His name became enshrined in the field with the Scherbius principle for asynchronous motors.
It was probably World War I that made Scherbius succumb to the bacillus of cryptography. Yet that science was underdeveloped in German-speaking lands. The most recent comprehensive text in German dated from 1881, more than forty years before, and the author had had to publish it himself. The German and Austrian literature after that time consisted of a handful of scholarly historical articles and books, a few survey articles in scattered magazines, pamphlets telling how to shield love letters and telephone conversationsfrom pryers, a booklet overview of elementary ciphers intended for businessmen, and studies of cable secrecy and codes. A few dozen cipher devices had been patented in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, but they had merely mechanized systems that were hundreds of years old.
Perhaps the greatest activity, and that not very intense, was manifest in the publication in German of commercial codes. These thick books, sometimes produced privately for a firm, sometimes published for general sale, replaced business and personal phrases with codewords. “Do not exceed limit,” for example, might become JIWUL. Their chief purpose was to economize on cable tolls. But they did provide some secrecy, they were constructed in the same way as many secret governmental codes, and they had the word “code” in their titles, all of which brought them into the purview of cryptology. The codewords, sometimes taken from real languages, sometimes made up, were always “pronounceable,” because international telegraph regulations set lower rates for pronounceable codewords than for unpronounceable ones or for codenumbers.
Scherbius’s first cryptographic device sought to maintain this economy while making these mostly nonsecret messages secret. It enciphered codenumbers into pronounceable codewords by replacing the successive digits alternately with vowels and consonants. One of the first cipher mechanisms to employ electricity, it passed the input impulses through “multiple switch boards which connect each arriving lead with one of the outgoing leads and which are adapted to interchange this connection with great facility of variation.”
These switchboards formed the germ of the rotor. That concept may have come to Scherbius while he was at a concert, as his best ideas often did. He was said to be very musical, but his mind apparently wandered frequently from the melody, for he often jotted ideas and made calculations on his cuffs while the orchestra played. His first rotor enciphered numbers, presumably codenumbers, gaining security but losing pronounceability.
A rotor for letters followed, and it was this device that Scherbius submitted to the navy and the Foreign Office in the spring of 1918. That both rejected his machine did not diminish his confidence in it. He turned to the commercial market.
Scherbius & Ritter transferred the cipher patent
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