The Riverbank Ciphers

George Fabyan was a Boston dry goods heir who bought ten acres on the west bank of the Fox at Geneva in 1905, went on buying until the estate ran to several hundred, and spent the family income on whatever questions took him. Riverbank Laboratories, founded there in 1913, worked on genetics, acoustics and ciphers at once. In 1918 Fabyan built an acoustical chamber to the specifications of the Harvard physicist Wallace Sabine, who had complained about his own laboratory at home. Sabine died in January 1919, barely a year later, and his cousin Paul ran the place for three decades. It is an accredited acoustical testing laboratory on the old estate ground still, and calls itself the oldest anywhere. The cipher work began from a conviction that turned out to be wrong. Fabyan believed Francis Bacon had written Shakespeare and had signed the plays in a biliteral cipher hidden in the typefaces of the early folios, and he hired staff to prove it. Two of them were William Friedman, a geneticist brought in to breed wheat, and Elizebeth Smith, an English literature graduate of Hillsdale College. They met over the Bacon ciphers, married in May 1917, and became the two most consequential cryptologists the country made. When the United States declared war in April 1917 the army had no working cryptanalytic bureau, so Riverbank did what work there was, unpaid, for the army, the navy and the Justice Department, and ran six week courses for the officers who would build one. In the early nineties the National Security Agency put up a plaque at Riverbank, thanking Colonel Fabyan on behalf of a grateful government for the cryptanalysis and the cryptologic training he had paid for himself.