The short version
This project spends its days checking other people’s claims. Today it checked its own, and three of them did not survive.
The front page of this site said that Book VI of Bacon’s De Augmentis gave the world binary code, steganography and telecommunications. Asked plainly whether that is historically accurate, the answer is no. Each of the three has a clear precedent, and two of them are not close.
Questions
What is the biliteral cipher?
Sir Francis Bacon described it in 1623. Every letter becomes a group of five symbols, each symbol either an a or a b — five binary digits, three hundred years before anyone called them that.
The two symbols need not be letters. They can be two founts of type so similar that a reader notices nothing. The system is sound; nothing here disputes it.
What did you check today?
This site’s own front page. It carries two lists of twenty things Bacon started that are still running, and three of those entries amounted to priority claims — that he gave the world binary code, telecommunications and steganography.
A priority claim is the easiest kind to check and the easiest kind to lose. Somebody either did the thing earlier or they did not.
What did you get wrong?
Steganography. Johannes Trithemius wrote Steganographia around 1499; it was printed in Frankfurt in 1606, seventeen years before De Augmentis. He coined the word. Giambattista della Porta published on concealed writing in 1563. The practice goes back to Herodotus. Bacon inherited a named discipline with a literature.
Telecommunications. Worse. Polybius describes a working torch telegraph that sent arbitrary letters over distance, with a two-torch handshake so the sender knew the receiver was watching. And he does not claim it — he credits Cleoxenus and Democleitus before him. That is around 150 BCE. Bacon is roughly seventeen centuries late.
Binary. The survivor, but it needed narrowing. The biliteral cipher is a genuine fixed-length binary encoding of an alphabet. It is not the first use of binary: Pingala enumerated binary syllable patterns in antiquity, and Leibniz formalized binary arithmetic in 1679. “First binary code in the world” overreaches.
Then what is actually his?
The union, and it is a stronger claim than any of the three it replaces.
Polybius had a carrier but no general code — his scheme was torches and only torches. Trithemius had concealment but no encoding. Pingala had binary but transmitted nothing. Book VI is the first place all three appear together: an arbitrary message, reduced to fixed-length binary, carried by any medium that can hold two states, in a way that conceals that anything is being carried.
That is the architecture of digital communication, and no one before him had assembled it.
Does this damage the project?
It improves it. An overstated claim on the front page is the first thing a hostile reader tests, and the one they use to dismiss everything measured behind it. Three such claims were sitting above work whose whole discipline is not overclaiming.
Naming Polybius and Trithemius before anyone else does converts the weakest point on the site into a demonstration that the project checks itself. That is worth more than the claims were.
What has this to do with the cipher work?
More than expected. The defensive half of modern steganography is called steganalysis: you hold a carrier and must decide whether a hidden binary modulation is present in it. That is the same problem this project has been working on all month, with Folio glyphs as the carrier.
That field already has the quantity this project measured from scratch yesterday. It calls it embedding rate, and its central result is that a payload small enough relative to its carrier is not merely hard to detect but provably hard. Yesterday’s detection thresholds are the same quantity on a different carrier.
Where does digital steganography actually turn up?
Printer identification dots, the near-invisible yellow grid colour laser printers lay down encoding a serial number and timestamp — the biliteral cipher in a printing process. Forensic watermarking, so a leaked screener identifies its source. Copyright watermarking that survives compression and cropping. Protocol obfuscation, where what is concealed is not the content but the fact that circumvention is happening. Covert channels in packet timing. And provenance marks in generated images, audio and text.
All of them answer to Bacon’s criterion: the thing must not raise suspicion.
Who is doing this, and why?
Walter Wilkinson, in Worland, Wyoming, with a computer and free scans. No institution, no funding.
The aim is to find out whether the evidence offered for the biliteral decipherment carries the weight placed on it — and to publish the answer in the same terms whichever way it falls. Today it fell against this project’s own front page.
More at New Gorhambury, and at Experiment One. Experiment One argues a conclusion; these reports deliberately do not.
External documents
Every source relied on today, with what it is, what you would find there, and what it is doing in this issue. The link comes last on purpose.
Technical colophon
Prior know-how is assumed, and the items become more “technical” toward the bottom.
This issue was produced on 12 October 2026. It is documentary work, not image work: no glyph was measured today. The question was whether three claims this project publishes about Book VI of De Augmentis are historically accurate, and the method was to look for earlier instances of each.
⚑ The three claims, before and after
BEFORE AFTER The binary code -> Binary encoding of the alphabet Telecommunications -> Medium-independent signalling Steganography as a A test for concealment distinct art
The consequence line of the second also went. It read “This brought forth the Internet” — the broadest causal claim on the site — and now reads that any two-state carrier will serve, which is why the same bits travel over copper, fibre and radio.
⚑ Polybius X.45, in detail
The scheme that defeats the telecommunications claim is not a beacon. A beacon sends one bit, and only a message agreed beforehand. Polybius describes something else:
alphabet divided into 5 groups of 5 left torches -> which group right torches -> which letter in it 2 torches raised and answered first, as a handshake
That is arbitrary text, letter by letter, over distance, with flow control. Polybius states the motive explicitly: earlier systems could only transmit messages anticipated in advance, and he wanted to send news that had not been. He also credits Cleoxenus and Democleitus rather than himself, so even this is not the first instance.
⚑ Dates, for the steganography claim
c. 1499 Trithemius writes Steganographia 1563 della Porta, De Furtivis Literarum Notis 1606 Steganographia printed, Frankfurt 1623 De Augmentis
Seventeen years between the printing and De Augmentis, and about a hundred and twenty between the writing and it. The word itself is Trithemius’s.
⚑ What survives on binary, and what does not
The biliteral cipher is a fixed-length binary encoding of an alphabet: five places, two states, thirty-two available patterns for twenty-four letters. That is a real and specific thing, and it has the same structure as the five-bit telegraph codes that came later.
Two cautions keep it honest. Binary representation is older — Pingala enumerates binary syllable patterns in antiquity. Binary arithmetic is later and is Leibniz’s — Bacon encodes with two states but never computes with them. And the structural resemblance to Baudot is not a claim of influence: there is no evidence the one descends from the other, and none is asserted here.
⚑ The claim that replaces them
Stated so it can be attacked:
Book VI of De Augmentis (1623) is the earliest known text in which all three of the following appear together as one method: 1. an arbitrary message reduced to a FIXED-LENGTH BINARY CODE 2. carried by ANY MEDIUM capable of two distinguishable states 3. in a manner that CONCEALS that a message is being carried
Each component is individually anticipated. The falsifier is simple: produce a text before 1623 in which all three appear together. Polybius has 1 in a restricted form and 2 in one medium only; Trithemius has 3; Pingala has a version of 1 and neither of the others.
⚑ Steganalysis, and why it bears on this project
The defensive half of digital steganography is steganalysis: given a carrier, decide whether a hidden binary modulation is present. That is formally the problem this project has been running against Folio glyphs.
The relevant quantity there is embedding rate — payload size relative to carrier capacity — and the standing result is that below a certain rate, detection becomes not merely difficult but statistically hopeless for a given sample size. Yesterday’s detection thresholds (7% in size, 13% in tail length, 6 degrees of slant, with weight and roundness undetectable at any magnitude) are that same quantity measured on a different carrier. The audit now has a second body of prior art to cite and a vocabulary a security researcher would recognise.
Not yet done: mapping the thresholds onto the steganalysis formalism properly, so they can be stated as an embedding rate rather than as five separate feature magnitudes.
⚑ Corrections to earlier issues
To the landing page, and to the project document behind it. Global list entries 2, 3 and 9 carried priority claims that do not hold. All three were rewritten today and a paragraph was added above the lists naming the precedents. The old wording is preserved in the table above rather than quietly dropped.
Not affected: the 11 October issue. Its measurements — the 174-glyph corpus, the separation test, the thresholds, the finding about Gallup’s front matter — stand unaltered. Today’s correction is to this project’s framing of Bacon, not to anything measured about the Folio.
⚑ Failures and dead ends
the original formulation, offered and withdrawn
"Book VI introduces three technologies at the base of the
Internet: binary code, digital steganography,
telecommunications"
-> two of the three fail on priority, and badly. Kept here
because the discarded version is the evidence that the
check was actually run.
sources consulted at second hand, and marked as such
Polybius X.45 read through a description, not the Greek
Steganographia dated from its catalog record, not the text
della Porta, Pingala and Leibniz cited from general
knowledge; all three are cited AGAINST this project's own
claim, which is the conservative direction, but none of
them has been read for this issue.
⚑ Environment
No computation today. Web search and page retrieval for the priority checks; the project archive for the document under correction. The three source cards marked Gap · not in hand in column B are exactly the ones a reader should not take on this project’s word.
⚑ Publication
GitHub Pages from the repository root, no build step, no framework, no analytics, no trackers and no cookies. The custom domain baconian-ciphers.online resolves through four A records at the apex to GitHub’s addresses, with www a CNAME to the Pages host; TLS is issued automatically and HTTPS is enforced. All internal links are relative, so a change of domain touches one file. Total infrastructure cost is about a dollar a year — chosen deliberately, so that nothing here depends on a service that can withdraw it. Issues are superseded, never deleted: a link sent today will resolve next year.