An antique dress held coded weather observations in a hidden pocket

A mysterious code found in the pocket of a Victorian-era silk dress has been cracked, and its contents speak to a bygone history of U.S. weather observation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently reported.

The mystery was sparked when archaeologist and antique fashion collector Sara Rivers Cofield purchased an 1880s-era silk gown at a Maine antique mall in 2013. The bronze-colored dress held a secret: A hidden pocket beneath the bustle contained crumpled, handwritten notes covered with place names, seemingly random words and numbers.

Suspecting the notes were in code, Cofield posted the puzzle online, where it intrigued — and stymied — cryptographers.

Eventually, the dress earned a place on code aficionados’ lists of ongoing mysteries — until Wayne Chan, an analyst with the University of Manitoba’s Center for Earth Observation Science, got hold of it.

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Chan hypothesized that the notes were a telegraph code of the type commonly used to compress information, or keep the contents of telegraphed information private, in the 19th century. Chan knew that the mining, grocery and banking industries, for example, used their own codes at the time, and he examined 170 code books to see whether the words might match any known codes of the era.

A chance reference in an 1880 book on telegraph history revealed a clue: similar codes used by the U.S. Army Signal Corps and the National Weather Service’s predecessor, the U.S. Weather Bureau, which transmitted weather observations via telegraphic circuit throughout the late 19th century. That early weather code was a forerunner of the modern shorthand used to disseminate meteorological information today.

Eventually, Chan turned to NOAA librarians for materials that helped him crack the code, linking it to weather observations taken in Texas, Indiana, Illinois, Mississippi and a variety of other locations on May 27, 1888. But the identity of the dress’s previous owner and her connection to weather observation remain murky.

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“Despite the fact that hundreds of coded weather telegrams were sent each day, it is probable that the messages were considered ephemera and rarely archived,” Chan wrote in a paper about the silk dress’s code that was published in the journal Cryptologia. Thus, he adds, the code is “invaluable” as a document of a little-remembered aspect of meteorology history.

In a news release on NOAA’s website, the agency calls the dress “a kind of time travel portal” — one that points to what the weather was like throughout the United States over a century ago.

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