Not a post about the upcoming holiday, but about what happened when someone mistyped a word and just possibly helped hasten the Allied victory in World War II.
Jake Rossen writes at Mental Floss about the time that the Bletchley Park codebreaking operation recruited a cryptogamist named Geoffrey Tandy in 1939. The Ministry of Defence wanted scientists to help with efforts to crack the secret German military codes; this operation included brilliant mathematicians like Alan Turing.
The problem: A codebreaker is a cryptogramist, with an "r." A "cryptogamist" like Tandy studies algae. For two years, Tandy worked with the group but was more or less extraneous.
Until the day in 1941 that the Allies recovered papers from a sunken German submarine that showed how to use the German coding machine Enigma to decode encrypted German messages. Papers that were waterlogged. Papers that needed highly specialized techniques to be dried out and still remain both legible and intact -- techniques not entirely dissimilar to those that a cryptogamist might use to dry out fragile algae for study.
Sucks to be you, Adolf.
1 comment:
Similarly, I have seen "etymology" and "entomology" confused in print.
You really don't want to ask an etymologist if you're likely to die from that bug bite you just got...
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