Ohio Cipher update…

A quick update on the Ohio Cipher for you.

Firstly, while looking for more mentions of the story in other 1916 Ohio newspapers, I stumbled across an article in the 4th July 1916 edition of the Coshocton Morning Tribune, which said:-

The Eastern Puzzlers League, organized in 1883 for the construction, solving and exploitation of enigmas, met here [Warren, OH] today for its semi-annual convention.

As I understand it, the Eastern Puzzlers League grew into the National Puzzlers League, whose magazine “Enigma” was where the cryptogram later appeared. Might the Ohio Cipher have therefore been planted in an Ohio paper by a convention attendee simply for a bit of fun? If so, the NPL version of the ciphertext would probably be the correct one, rather than the one in the Lima Times-Democrat. All the same, Ohio is a big place, and Warren is the opposite side to Lima… so all this might just be a coincidence. Or perhaps the Ohio Cipher was the talk of the convention, and so it was natural to write it up in the newsletter?

Secondly, the National Puzzlers League version of the story says “The police department of Lima, O., is greatly puzzled over a cryptic message received in connection with the robbery of a Western Ohio ticket agent.” At first, I thought that “Western Ohio” was a rather imprecise description (as somebody once said, ‘Ohio is a big place’), until I realized that this was a reference to a railway.

Launched in 1903, the Western Ohio Railway was an electric railway based in Lima, known as the “Lima Route”. It was an interurban railway that had many stops around Lima, where its fierce competitor was Ohio Electric. 1916 arguably was during its golden age: the Railway collapsed in 1932, one of the many smaller railways to fail during the Great Depression.

Hence it seems likely that if the Ohio Cipher is genuine (and that the National Puzzlers League account is also essentially correct), it was indeed linked with an incident in Lima, OH. However, I haven’t been able to find any historical archives connected with Western Ohio Railway (reformed in 1928 as “Western Ohio Railway & Power Co”) at all… maybe there aren’t any to be found. If there is something to be found, I suspect it will be in court or police records.

Finally: “WAS NVKVAFT BY AAKAT TXPXSCK UPBK TXPHN OHAY YBTX CPT MXHG WAE SXFP ZAVFZ ACK THERE FIRST TXLK WEEK WAYX ZA WITH THX” looks to me to be a bit of an unusual ciphertext, in that it seems to mix up both enciphered and unenciphered words.

What’s more, various features of the enciphered words hint at a kind of verbose or Polybius square cipher:-
* X appears eight times, always on an even position inside a word
* T appears seven times, always on an odd position inside a word

What is going on here? I really don’t believe this is any kind of simple substitution cipher, but rather something more like the WW2 “Slidex” cipher which similarly mixed enciphered and unenciphered text. Might parts of it be some kind of low-level private telegraphic code?