Elizebeth Smith Friedman (1892-1980) had her share of “Eureka!” moments. She and her husband William were both cryptanalysts. They broke secret codes for a living.

            Elizebeth worked for the Coast Guard, and for a time, her exploits made her famous as she broke codes smugglers used to sell liquor during Prohibition. But during World War II, Elizebeth helped American and British intelligence officials read the secret messages sent by Nazi agents throughout South America, where this enemy was attempting to install governments friendly to Hitler.

            One of the easiest codes to make — and break — is known as a substitution code. One letter or symbol is substituted for a particular letter. The way to break it is to look for letter frequencies. Each language has letters that occur more frequently than others, and once you figure out that Z, for instance, might stand for E, or L for S, you can begin making guesses about some of the less frequent letters. Soon you’ve cracked the code.

            To make their codes harder to break, the Nazis invented the ENIGMA machine. When one typed a message on the machine, ENIGMA created a new substitution code for each letter. A 50-letter message, for instance, would have 50 different codes. The recipient set their ENIGMA to the same setting to unscramble the 50 different codes. That seemed impossible to break.

            But Elizebeth mentally stacked fifty messages one on top of the other. Eureka! Now she could crack the substitution code of the first letter of every message, then the second letter, then the third. Thanks to her work, the Nazi agents were foiled.

            After the war, as computers took over her role, Elizebeth lamented that cryptanalysts would no longer have the eureka moments when suddenly everything made sense.

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