The famed Nineteenth Century British author Charles Dickens produced a vast volume of words preserved for posterity to endure in English literature classes. Some of those words have only recently become accessible thanks to a crowdsourced decoding project which has broken the cipher that Dickens used for his private notes.
The Dickens Code project, led by Dr. Claire Wood of the University of Leicester, has deciphered the shorthand system that Dickens called brachygraphy. It was a great challenge because Dickens expanded and changed the system over time.
BBC News reports that the crucial break came from a draft of Dickens's so-called "Tavistock letter". The team of over a thousand volunteers discovered that it was a letter to an advertising manager at The Times newspaper. The surviving response from that manager led the codebreakers to discover Dickens's symbols for "Ascension Day", "advertisement", "refused", and "sent back." Now Dickens's secret shorthand is beginning to reveal itself.
-via Marginal Revolution | Photo via the James Gardiner Collection