The Secret Telegraphic Codes of Henry Ford

Rebecca Bizonet:

While cataloging a portion of the vast Henry Ford Office records (some 1,600 cubic feet), I became very excited when I discovered what I thought was a secret code. I later learned (quite fortuitously from a colleague on Twitter) that these documents formed a part of something almost equally fascinating.

It turned out that what I had instead was a commercial telegraphic code. From the 19th through the mid-20th centuries, telegrams were integral to business and personal communications. Telegraph codes proliferated as a way to correspond economically and privately. Readily available code books such as the ABC Universal Commercial Electric Telegraph Code, not to mention many others, were published, with many businesses creating in-house codes.

[via Those smug bastards at MeFi]

1. [Matthew B. Tepper]

   Is there any code relating to, umm, people of a religion that he didn’t like? (Such as me?)

2. [Anonymous]

   This is not unusual in business of the time. I have an American Radiator catalog which has an appendix of telegraph code, presumably so that you could order their products with codes which were much shorter than the catalog descriptions and therefore cheaper to transmit – you paid by the letter!

3. [Anonymous]

   Dculberson:

   But “Go to” is two words and “aladab” is one. You paid by the word for telegrams.

4. [Bucket]

   I want the code for “Find him and kill him.”

5. [dculberson]

   I think it’s hysterical that “Go to” is actually shorter than the cryptic code they “shorten” it to, “Aladab.” Will management ever change?

6. [phisrow]

   Interesting. Compression before compression was handled algorithmically and in the background(thanks Huffman!).

7. [Dave Faris]

   Abacab …….. Look up on the wall, there on the floor.

8. [Joe in Australia]

   I think it’s hysterical that “Go to” is actually shorter than the cryptic code they “shorten” it to, “Aladab.”

   Telegraph offices charged by the word, not the character. So by using “aladab” you reduced the cost by one unit. Also, I guess, codes provided a certain amount of error checking: as long as your codes are sufficiently distinct then an error will be immediately obvious, while “go to” might be mis-coded as “got to” or something similar.

9. [Pantograph]

   People should say “aladay” when they mean “go ahead”.

   Who’d have thunk that the old misanthropic antisemite conspiracy theorist had one good idea after all.

10. [O_M]

    “Abacab …….. Look up on the wall, there on the floor.”

    …Dammit. I was going to say:

    Abacab …….. I hate Phil Collins.