The One Fully Worked Example — Solution and Carrier, Mapped

Who Mr. Millett was — and why he counts

J. B. Millet of Boston — Josiah Byram Millet (1853–1938), Harvard graduate and founder of the J. B. Millet Company, publishers — was not a distant commentator. He was a first-hand witness in Dr. Owen’s Detroit workshop, and on his first visit, in February 1893, he worked the cipher himself.

Owen gave him a key-word — the Story of the Spanish Armada — and showed him how to proceed. Pencil in hand, Millett copied about a hundred lines from various parts of the wheel, then joined those disconnected sentences into an intelligible statement without adding a word. Owen had written his own version independently, beforehand. The two were compared: The two copies corresponded almost exactly, the differences being slight errors in copying. That is a blind reproducibility test, run by a first-time visitor.

On a third visit, in December 1895, he was admitted to the workshop alone and spent hours there before Owen appeared. Going through some 2,000 sheets of Owen’s extracts unsupervised, he satisfied himself that many passages came from the Iliad — a judgment he was equipped to make, having read Homer since university.

Sources: Millett’s own account of his Detroit visits, in a later Baconiana than the April 1895 article mapped below. The exact issue and date of that account are still being pinned down — noted here rather than glossed over.