At the very end of Sir Francis Bacon’s magisterial classic, The Advancement of Learning, appearing like a disconnected afterthought, Fr.B starts writing about Cryptography, and mentions the six cipher methods he had invented to conceal secret messages within openly visible public documents — for instance, possibly, the books and essays previously written by him. Or how about even the main body of the enclosing document, The Advancement of Learning, itself? This possibility (if not probability) has gone almost completely unnoticed by the World for precisely 400 years.

The original scope of the New Gorhambury Project was to investigate only two of the six methods, his Biliteral Cipher, and his Word Cipher, where at least tidbits of information were extant. The first of those is now called the Binary Code, and is the foundation of the current Digital World we all live in.

The second of those has remained mysterious. There is no published, fully-worked example of the Word Cipher in use. Therefore the primary goal of one of the two main branches of this project is to supply that, in exacting detail, via this website.

How significant could the Word Cipher be? Fr.B invented the Binary Code when he was only seventeen years old; yet in his writings the same person repeatedly identifies his Word Cipher as the superior of the two! What if it was true?

No one previously has attempted to characterize the System Architecture of Fr.B‘s multi-tier cipher scheme, using the techniques and visualization tools already in routine use to aid Systems Theory. Below is a kind of interim report of this research effort, still in its infancy.

One obvious question is, How do the two cipher methods relate to each other or interact?

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Notes for this page:

• For Word Cipher, see also:
• Experiment Eleven
• For Newly-Discovered brief description of other four Cipher Methods:
• The Six Baconian Cipher Methods