Historian+Quest,+Edgar+Allen+Poe+(Demosthenes)

Overview
Edgar Allen Poe Cryptography

**History**
Edgar Allen Poe, who was one quirky historical figure, was obsessive about many of his hobbies. As it turns out, one of these was the study of creating and breaking ciphers. Small, simple ciphers appeared in several of his poems and short stories, most famously in "The Gold Bug." In 1839, Poe began a personal cryptographic challenge in //Alexander's Weekly Magazine//. For the duration of the challenge, which lasted for 6 months (until the spring of 1840), Poe published over 100 ciphers that had been sent to him by fans and readers, as well as the solution to every one of them. In 1841, Poe wrote an article for //Graham's Magazine//, in which he lamented that he had been able to solve every cipher except for two. These appeared to be written and sent by one Mr. W.B. Taylor, the first of which appears here. Poe issued a challenge for all of his fans that had sent him ciphers (and those who hadn't) to attempt to solve these two cryptographs. It is suspected that Poe himself might have created the ciphers (although not the actual text), but there is no proof.

The first of the two ciphers is a challenge cipher. It was created using polyalphabetic substitution, which means that frequently occurring letters were substituted by many different letters, rather than just one. For example, the letter 'e' is substituted by 14 different letters. This, of course, makes the cipher extremely difficult to solve. The second cipher, which was solved by Terence Whalen in 1992, is a monoalphabetic cipher (which means that it is a common replacement cipher).

**Opinion**
(There is no text here yet.)

**Future Trends?**
(There is no text here yet.)