An antique silk dress with a secret pocket. Inside, scraps of crumpled paper with seemingly random words and numbers written on them. These appear to be elements of a good mystery, and they are. It has come to be called "The Silk Dress Cryptogram".
Sara Rivers Cofield, an archaeologist, had been shopping for old dresses and handbags in 2013, and happened upon a shiny bronze-colored dress, which she presumed to be dated around the 1880s. After buying the dress and giving it a thorough look, she found the pieces of paper with lines of words written on them such as:
Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank
Calgary, Cuba, unguard, confute, duck, fagan
Spring, wilderness, lining, one, reading, novice.
Not knowing what they meant, she posted it online and asked help from cryptographers and antiques experts to decipher what the code was referring to. Ten years later, a researcher from the University of Manitoba, Wayne Chan, had decided to try and crack the code.
Given everything that was known about the dress and about codes, Chan waded through 170 telegraphic codebooks to figure out what the cryptic lines represented.
Despite not finding anything from those codebooks, he did find a book called Telegraphic Tales and Telegraphic History which contained a section that matched several of the words from the cryptogram. He dug a bit deeper, and his search led him to the "Weather Code" from NOAA's Central Library in Silver Spring, Maryland.
With the help of that codebook, Chan was able to decipher what the lines meant. For example, the line Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank referred to the station name (Bismarck, North Dakota), air temperature, dew point, state of weather, and current wind velocity.
After ten years, the silk dress cryptogram's code has been cracked, but questions lingered. Whose dress was it? Why did they keep pieces of paper with weather codes written on them? Rivers Cofield had tried to do some sleuthing in that regard, but there's no way to conclusively know such details, and so, that part of the mystery is left for someone else to solve. - via Atlas Obscura
(Image credit: Sara Rivers Cofield)