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The code book: the science of secrecy from ancient egypt to quantum
cryptography [Book Review]

Article  in  IEEE Annals of the History of Computing · May 2002

DOI: 10.1109/MAHC.2002.1010078 · Source: IEEE Xplore

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Virginia Franke Kleist

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on his research, Hugill ably draws the reader
through the history of modern communications
technology. Chapter two covers the broader
developments of global telegraphy, in particular
submarine telegraph cables, prior to World War
I. In chapter three, Hugill argues that the success
of effective, reliable long-distance telephony in
the US resulted from the political unity and size
of the continent. In chapters four and five, Hugill
covers the emergence of radio, first for wireless
telegraphy and then later for voice transmission.
The subsequent two chapters are extended
discussions of the use of wireless communica-
tions for command and control of military
forces in the 1914–1945 period. In chapter six,
Hugill argues that the search for renewed mobil-
ity followed the failure of trench warfare by
1915 and, on land, led to the adaptation of
existing wireless systems to aircraft, particularly
for use as artillery spotters. Chapter seven is an
impressive exploration of the origins of radar in
Britain’s pre-World War II commercial television
and shortwave wireless telegraphy industries.
The final chapter is a survey of the evolution
of communications technology since World War
II, notably in the realm of satellites, interna-
tional phone cables, and fiber optic cables. Here
he tries to explain how the rise of the US to glob-
al predominance stemmed mostly from its
communications position. Hugill describes com-
munications technology as the “key technology
for hegemonic power in this period of the world
economy,” (page 223) but tempers that with the
proposition that in the future no single power
will be able to control the cables and satellites
the way that Britain and the US had in the past.
Hugill’s work is expansive and one of the few
attempts to explain this topic over such a broad
sweep of history. However, he has relied chiefly on
secondary literature that now needs to be updat-
ed with archival research rather than a regurgita-
tion of memoirs and contemporary literature, and
this has inhibited his analysis. For example, he crit-
icizes the US government decision in 1922 to leave
short-wave bands for amateur work. Aside from
the fact that he attributes the decision to the
Federal Communications Commission 12 years
before the FCC was created, it was not until 1924
that Guglielmo Marconi’s own successful experi-
ments (and those of the US Navy at the same time)
demonstrated the practical value of that end of the
spectrum, and both US and British firms rapidly
retooled to take advantage of that spectrum. At the
same time, he omits discussion of the significance
of the 1927 Washington Radio Conference, where
international adoption of the US system of fre-
quency allocation was a major step toward US pre-
dominance in the global field.
Hugill tackled a significant and difficult his-
torical problem—that of determining the real
impact of communications technology and
information processing on military and national
strategy in two world wars and throughout the
20th century. Laudable and impressive as his
effort is, however, it suffers because there must
be further archival research and analysis of the
topic by historians before the kinds of broad con-
clusions Hugill draws can be formulated and sub-
stantiated. Nevertheless, while his arguments
may appeal chiefly to geographers and propo-
nents of a world systems theory, his examination
of the evolution and importance of communi-
cations technology to world affairs is a useful
contribution to this underexplored topic.
Jonathan Winkler
Yale University
jonathan.winkler@yale.edu
Jonathan Winkler is a PhD candidate in US diplomat-
ic and international history at Yale University. Recently
a Smithsonian Fellow at the National Museum of
American History, he is conducting research on his dis-
sertation, an examination of US foreign policy with
regard to international submarine telegraph cables and
radio circuits between 1900 and World War II.
Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of
Secrecy From Ancient Egypt to Quantum
Cryptography, Doubleday, New York, 1999,
$24.95, 402 pp., ISBN 0-385-49531-5.
Warfare, espionage, commerce, and affairs
of the heart create the need for secret commu-
nications. Singh traces the escalation in com-
plexity between encryption and unauthorized
decryption techniques over time.
From the simple ciphers of early times to the
elegant computer-based algorithms used today,
most private communications techniques use
“keys” to encrypt plaintext into ciphertext. As The
Code Book shows, some of the history of code
breaking parallels the history of early computing
devices. Singh begins with ancient codes, traces
the background of the Rosetta stone and Linear B
(languages hidden from us but unraveled in much
the same way as secretly encoded messages), and
carries the reader through a balanced treatment of
secret codes used in World Wars I and II, finishing
up with coverage of newer codes such as RSA and
the Zimmerman Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) code.
The book includes the story of the Enigma
machines and the British electromechanical
“bombes,” precursors to the early computers that
came out of World War II. Where most accounts
focus on the British role in deciphering German
Enigma messages, Singh examines Rejewski’s
pre-war Polish mathematical and mechanical
April–June 2002 97
 Reviews
contributions to the ultimately successful effort
in breaking the coding device’s grip on Europe.
Singh’s description of the wiring of the Enigma
machine and the simplified schematic of how
the scrambling device works is reason enough to
read the book. Even more fascinating is his dis-
cussion of the popular Bletchley Park “bombes,”
and Turing’s role in their design across the latter
part of World War II.
Other contributions of this book are its
exposition of facts behind popular figures in
the development of codes and codebreaking.
For example, although Babbage is well known
for his design of the first tabulating computer,
his role in solving the fairly sophisticated
Vigenere cipher is less well known. Another
point of interest is that the British developed a
version of the RSA coding long before
Americans, but this was kept secret by the
English government for security reasons.
In summary, this book compares favorably
with other books on cryptography, yet adds a
new and vital perspective.
Virginia Franke Kleist
West Virginia University
vfkleist@mail.wvu.edu
Virginia Franke Kleist is an assistant professor of
management of information systems at West Virginia
University, where she teaches courses on electronic
commerce and data communications, including
material about the historical roots of today’s cryp-
tography and coding techniques.
Christine L. Borgman, From Gutenberg to the
Global Information Infrastructure: Access to
Information in the Networked World, MIT
Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2000, 340 pp.,
ISBN 026202473X.
The technology of libraries is changing so
rapidly that it seems likely that this book will
be read in very different ways as time progress-
es. For the moment, it will be read as a descrip-
tion of the modern digital library, the sort of
library currently available to the more sophis-
ticated users of network resources. At a time,
not very long in the future, it will probably be
viewed as a quaint and slightly outmoded
vision, held by the librarians of the year 2000.
Finally, historians will turn to the book as a par-
tial record of the way libraries evolved from
print and paper to screens and bits.
The book is targeted at students of library
science, primarily those students who do not
have much experience with the tools of the
information age. The author, a professor of
Library Science at UCLA, has done an excellent
98 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
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job of outlining the issues in developing digi-
tal libraries, the technology involved, and the
human issues that these new libraries present.
It begins with a discussion of the idea of the
information infrastructure. It then presents
some of the new technology for libraries and
probes some of the reasons that these tech-
nologies might be difficult for some to use.
Finally, it ends with a vision for how librarians
should be thinking about the future. It is well
written and researched and should be a valu-
able tool.
For the moment, the book will probably be
of most interest to those who are working with
community or secondary school libraries. For
such individuals, the book is a welcome re-
source, providing not only ideas for how to
develop a library but also to convince library
boards and civic visitors of the benefits of the
new technologies. For the readers of this jour-
nal, the greatest value of the book may come
10 or 15 years hence, when we turn to it to see
how the Internet changed the nature of
libraries.
David Alan Grier
George Washington University
grier@gwu.edu
Donald E. Knuth, Selected Papers on Analysis of
Algorithms, CSLI Lecture Notes, no. 102,
Center for the Study of Language and
Innovation, Stanford Univ., Stanford, Calif.,
2000, $27.95, (paperback), ISBN 1-57586-
212-3, $74.95, (hardback), ISBN 1-57586-
211-5. This book is distributed by Cambridge
Univ. Press, Port Chester, N.Y.
This book, fourth in a series of eight
planned volumes containing selected scientif-
ic papers of Donald E. Knuth, collects 34 of
Knuth’s papers on analysis of algorithms. The
articles cover a wide range of topics, including
data structures, optimization, arithmetic, and
complexity theory.
Knuth is well known for his contributions to
computer science, which range from program-
ming languages to the design of TeX and
Metafont, which, with various extensions, are
now de facto typesetting standards in many
areas of science. His series of textbooks have
served many people, including this reviewer, as
their introduction to algorithmic design and
analysis. Knuth had coined the term “analysis
of algorithms” in his invited address to the 1970
International Congress of Mathematicians in
Nice and views this area as his “life’s work.”
Most of the book’s papers present the trans-
lation of a problem into precise mathematical