A Confederate cipher disk
Cowan’s Auctions (cowanauctions.com)
A Rare Decoding Device Hits Pay Dirt
The Artifact
A Confederate cipher disk
Condition
The cipher is in excellent condition given its age. Its stamped letters still retain their black and red coloring.
Details
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Francis LaBarre, a gold and silver worker plying his trade in Washington, D.C., fled the city and made his way to Richmond, where on April 22, 1861, he enlisted as a private in the 7th Virginia Infantry. While his stint as a soldier proved brief—he was discharged on May 14, 1862—LaBarre was contracted by the Confederate army to produce “cipher disks,” which were used to encrypt messages. Based on the Vigenère cipher, a method of polyalphabetic substitution, LaBarre’s devices, which were made of brass and measured just under 60 millimeters in diameter, consisted of two concentric disks that shared a common axle, each of them stamped with the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet written out clockwise around their outer edges. Armed with a disk and a secret keyword, the recipient could (in theory) quickly decode the ciphertext. In practice, errors in transmission—including letters missing or mistakenly added to coded messages—often made the decoding process difficult and time consuming.
By 1864, LaBarre, who was married with two children, was living in Baltimore, where the city directory listed his occupation as a “tinner.” He died in 1871, reportedly by committing suicide. He was in his early 50s.
Quotable
J. Willard Brown, a member of the U.S. Signal Corps during the Civil War, reflected on the use of ciphers in his postwar history of the organization: “It does not do away with the utility of ciphers that they may be sometimes deciphered, for we must often use them, conscious that, with sufficient time and the appliances, they can be interpreted; but knowing, also, that the time interpretation will require will render the message useless to an enemy.”
Value
$18,000 (price realized at Cowan’s Auctions in Cincinnati, Ohio, in November 2014). “Only a handful of Confederate cipher disks are known to exist, and this example comes from the highly regarded collection of distinguished American historian Philip D. Sang (1902–1975),” noted Wes Cowan, founder and owner of Cowan’s Auctions, at the time of the sale.
Related topics: technology
