Elizebeth Smith Friedman

Elizebeth Smith Friedman is a woman whose name is not one that immediately pops to mind when discussing cryptography or mathematics.  In reality, her husband is much more well known.

Elizebeth was born in 1892, the youngest of 9 children.  After receiving her degree in English lit with minors in Latin, Greek, and German, she ended up applying for a job at a library which lead to a job for a private think tank.

Her love of Shakespeare got her the job because people were attempting to prove Sir Frances Bacon actually wrote Shakespeare's plays and sonnets using a cipher. At this point, this facility had the only cryptologic laboratory in the nation and it was here, she met and married her husband.  They worked here for a few years until they moved to Washington D.C. to work for the War Department in 1921.

Somewhere along the line, she taught herself to figure out the keys for secret messages without knowing the key.  She was one of the original code breaker who pioneered techniques in the field. 

In 1923, she transferred to the navy where she worked as a  cryptanalyst.  She began by helping to break codes created by those to illegally transported alcohol and other goods at a time when alcohol was deemed illegal.  She helped capture crime lords during prohibition. During this time, she cracked over 20,000 messages whether simple code, transposition, or something more complex. 

In 1937, she helped the Canadian government convict an opium dealer by cracking the code based on Mandarin Chinese without knowing the language. Just a few years later, she and her team of code breakers began intercepting messages that were quite similar to the prohibition type messages but were sent by Nazi spies.

Furthermore, she focused on cracking certain Enigma codes, specifically those based in South America, so messages could be intercepted.  She shared the codes with the FBI, giving them the ability to intercept and translate every message.  This eventually lead to the greatest spy master of the time being shut down when they shut down the spy networks in South America.

She also discovered the letters written by Velvalee Dickinson contained coded information about the moves of ships at Pearl Harbor.  Her work was responsible for Velvalee's conviction. Over her career, she'd testified at numerous trials, each time able to explain how she broke the code and figured out what was being done.

Although others took credit for much of what she did, she is responsible for so much of what is done by code breakers then and now even to the point of helping set up procedures.  If you are interested in her story, check out the book "The Woman Who Smashed Codes" by Jason Fagone.

Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.