 | Monticello Secret Wooden Decoder Wheel. While serving as President George Washington's secretary of state (1790-1793), Thomas Jefferson devised an ingenious and secure method to encode and decode messages: the wheel cypher. During the American Revolution, Jefferson had relied primarily on messengers to hand-carry sensitive letters, but codes became an essential part of his correspondence when he was America's minister to France (1784-1789) since European postmasters opened and read all letters passing through their command. Jefferson's... - Monticello Secret Wooden Decoder Wheel. |
