Long before Quipher turned code-cracking into a daily habit, breaking codes was a matter of life, death, empires, and wars. Some of history's sharpest minds spent careers — or single sleepless nights — pulling apart messages their enemies thought were unreadable. Here are a few of the codebreakers who changed history, and the tricks they used that still show up in puzzles today.
Al-Kindi and the birth of frequency analysis (9th century)
The earliest known codebreaking breakthrough didn't come from a wartime codebreaker at all — it came from a Baghdad polymath named Al-Kindi. In the 9th century, he wrote the first known treatise on cryptanalysis, describing frequency analysis: the observation that in any language, some letters appear far more often than others (in English, think E and T). By counting which symbols show up most in a coded message, you can start matching them to real letters.
This single idea is still the backbone of solving substitution ciphers — including Quipher. Every time you notice that one number appears constantly and guess it might be "E," you're doing exactly what Al-Kindi described over a thousand years ago.
Elizebeth Friedman, the codebreaker who took down gangsters
Elizebeth Smith Friedman is one of the most under-credited codebreakers in American history. In the 1920s and '30s, she cracked coded radio transmissions used by Prohibition-era rum runners and organised crime syndicates, testifying in court cases that sent smugglers to prison. During the Second World War, she and her team broke ciphers used by Nazi spy rings operating in South America — work that stayed classified for decades.
Her husband, William Friedman, was also a towering figure in cryptography — but Elizebeth's own case files show a codebreaker who treated cipher-cracking as painstaking, patient detective work, not a flash of genius. That patience is the same skill a daily cryptogram rewards.
William Friedman and the birth of modern cryptanalysis
William Friedman is often called the father of modern American cryptanalysis. He introduced statistical methods — including the index of coincidence, a way of measuring how "random" a coded text looks — that turned codebreaking from an art into something closer to a science. His work laid the foundation for the US Army's Signals Intelligence Service and directly influenced how later teams, including those at Bletchley Park, approached the problem.
Alan Turing and the Enigma codebreakers of Bletchley Park
No list of famous codebreakers is complete without Bletchley Park. During the Second World War, a team of mathematicians, linguists, and puzzle enthusiasts — working in secrecy in the English countryside — broke Germany's Enigma cipher, an encryption machine the Nazis believed was unbreakable.
Alan Turing, a mathematician, designed the Bombe, an electromechanical machine that could test thousands of possible Enigma settings far faster than any human. But it wasn't Turing alone: Bletchley Park recruited chess champions, crossword setters, and — famously — some staff through a Daily Telegraph crossword competition, on the theory that people who were good at puzzles might be good at codebreaking too.
Historians estimate the work at Bletchley Park shortened the war by roughly two years and saved millions of lives.
What these codebreakers have in common
Strip away the wartime stakes, and every one of these codebreakers used the same core skills:
Pattern recognition — noticing which symbols repeat
Educated guessing — testing a hypothesis, then refining it
Patience — sitting with an unsolved puzzle rather than giving up early
Those are exactly the skills a daily cryptogram puzzle builds — just without the stakes of a world war. Every Quipher puzzle is, in miniature, the same kind of problem Al-Kindi, the Friedmans, and the Bletchley Park team spent their lives solving.
Frequently asked questions
Who is considered the first codebreaker?
Frequency analysis, the technique behind most classical codebreaking, is first documented in the 9th-century writings of the Arab polymath Al-Kindi — making him one of the earliest codebreakers on record.
Who was Elizebeth Friedman?
Elizebeth Smith Friedman was an American codebreaker who cracked smugglers' ciphers during Prohibition and later broke Nazi spy ciphers during the Second World War, though her work remained under-recognised for decades.
How long did it take to break the Enigma cipher?
Polish mathematicians first broke early Enigma ciphers in the 1930s; the Bletchley Park team, including Alan Turing, then built on that work throughout the Second World War as German procedures kept changing.
What's the connection between codebreaking and cryptogram puzzles like Quipher?
Both rely on the same core skills — pattern recognition, educated guessing, and patience — just applied to a quote instead of wartime intelligence.
Ready to put their techniques to the test? Play today's Quipher.