Sleuths Unravel Mystery Of Coded Weather Notes Found In An 1880s Dress Pocket

An antique dress.

A hidden pocket.

Two crumpled pieces of paper, covered in coded text.

A mystery that would take a decade to solve and become a window into the history of weather forecasting.

That’s what Sara Rivers Cofield got for $100 during a day of antiquing with her mom in wintry Maine more than a decade ago.

A​ Pocket Full Of 'Word Salad'

The rust-colored dress dates back to the 1880s. Rivers Cofield, a curator at the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory, bought it around Christmastime in 2013 to add to her collection of antique clothing.

As she unpacked her purchase, Rivers Cofield noticed the pocket, tucked away under layers of fabric and bustle, and felt something inside.

It took some digging to pull out the papers. She and her mom each took one and hurried to smooth them out and see who would get to read theirs first.

“But it didn't matter because we both opened it and it was just ‘word salad,’” Rivers Cofield told weather.com in a recent interview. “It made no sense.”

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One line reads: Smith nostrum linnet get none went.

Another: Cairo rural lining new johnson none.

Rivers Cofield posted it to her blog, “Commitment to Costumes.” She talked about how the dress was made and some of its more prominent features and, at the end, added a few lines about what she'd found in the pocket.

That prompted a brief flurry of interest from people who told Rivers Cofield the words were telegraph messages, which were written in a coded shorthand to make them cheaper and faster to send.

She largely forgot about the blog and the mystery and moved on.

“But what I didn't know is that the code community had really glommed onto this,” Rivers Cofield said. “And, unbeknownst to me, it got published as one of the ‘top 50 unbreakable codes’ in some list somewhere.”

Unraveling The ‘Silk Dress Cryptogram’

A community of hobbyists took on the challenge. One of them, Wayne Chan, a computer research analyst at the University of Manitoba and an amateur codebreaker, took a deep dive.

Chan’s research led him to deduce this particular telegraph code was a type used for sending weather reports collected by the U.S. Army and, later, the U.S. Weather Bureau.

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With help from NOAA and other sources, Chan figured out that each line was from a different weather station and included data on things like temperature, barometric pressure, wind, precipitation and cloud cover.

There were about 20 stations in all, spread across parts of the U.S. and Canada.

He was also able to figure out when the messages were sent: May 27, 1888.

The Telegraph And Weather Forecasting Are 'Intricately Linked'

The late 1800s were a pivotal time in the history of weather forecasting, according to meteorologist and historian Sean Potter.

“The history of weather forecasting is intricately linked to the history of the telegraph, which dates back to around 1840,” Potter told weather.com.

The invention of the telegraph allowed messages, including weather data, to be sent between distant locations.

“Those who were interested in weather forecasting were able to utilize that technology for the benefit of taking observations and turning them into forecasts,” Potter said.

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One of the first weather telegraph codes was created by Cleveland Abbe, who worked for the U.S. Weather Bureau in the 1870s and is often considered the nation’s first weather forecaster. Potter, who wrote a book about Abbe, said he also formed a network of citizen scientists to collect weather data.

“They had to not only take the observations and record them, but then they had to use this cipher system … these kind of odd, seemingly random words that were then transmitted via telegraph, like you see in the scraps of paper that were found in the dress,” Potter said.

There’s Still More To The Story

Wayne Chan’s research was published as a 42-page, peer-reviewed paper in the journal Cryptologia in August 2023, nearly 10 years after Rivers Cofield bought the dress.

What’s still not known is who the garment belonged to or why the papers were in the pocket. A tag sewn into the fabric reads “Bennett.”

Rivers Cofield thinks that person had a direct connection to the weather reports. Bennett could have been part of a citizen observer’s network, or simply a messenger.

"I had no idea that women were involved in, in the workplace, helping with this early weather forecasting,” Rivers Cofield said.

She intends to hold on to the dress but could see it going to a museum in the future.

“Trying to be a good steward of it and take good care of it, that's basically the only goal that I have at this point,” Rivers Cofield said.

Weather.com reporter Jan Childs covers breaking news and features related to weather, space, climate change, the environment and everything in between.

The Weather Company’s primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives.