Bacon

 
Bacon.png
 

The Baconian cipher, despite having nothing to do with bacon, is a delightful means of hiding and encrypting one message within another.  Firstly, convert all the letters in a secret message using the table below (I prefer the second version of Bacon's cipher as it uses all twenty six letters of the English alphabet).  Then create a plain text message that has at least five times the number of letters as the secret message.  Finally, using the converted secret message, change the typeface of the plain text message so that all the letters which correspond to “0” are of one type (like this), and all the letters which correspond to “1” are of a different type (like this).

 

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

00000

00001

00010

00011

00100

00101

00110

00111

01000

01001

01010

01011

01100

 

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

01101

01110

01111

10000

10001

10010

10011

10100

10101

10110

10111

11000

11001

 

For example, let's take “hello” as our secret message and convert it to:

00111 00100 01011 01011 01110

Using the plain text message “There is a secret message here”, we would get:

There is a secret message here.

 

It can be quite a subtle effect that would make for yet another fun postcard to send/receive.