You have found this description of the Great Fire of London. You suspect it contains a secret message encrypted using Bacon’s Cipher.
Can you work out what it really says?
the great fire was an accident.
oN ThE SEconD Of
SEPTEmbeR, The KiNG’s
BAkER LeFT ThE EMbeRS
oF HIs ovEN sMOuLDeRiNG.
THIS SET LiGHT tO SoME
fiRewOOD Left nearby. three
hours later his bakery in
pudding lane was on fire. the
winds then spread the fire
across london.
To decrypt a message written using Bacon’s Cipher:
1. Break the message into groups of 5 letters removing
punctuation and spaces.
2. Remove groups of letters that are all lower case.
3. Write the message out 5 letters at a time replacing
capital letters with ‘a’ and lower case letters with ‘b’.
4. Look up each group of 5 ‘a’s and ‘b’s in turn (the
ciphertext) and write down the letter from the table
(the plaintext).
You may need to guess between I and J and U and V as
they are each treated as one letter.
For example, given the message:
a poem: HelLO, WorLd
1. Break it in to groups of 5 letters:
apoem HelLO WorLd
2. Remove groups that are all lower case:
HelLO WorLd
3. Replace by ‘a’s and ‘b’s
abbaa abbab
4. Look up the cipher text letter for each group of 5 in the table to get the message
N O
Download a printable copy of this puzzle
Download a printable solution
Scratch Bacon Encryption Program
A bit of cs4fn 