Name: Cryptic notes in dress pocket shed light on weather history
Uploaded: 2025-12-25T03:38:09.823Z
Duration: 2 min 17 s
Description: Sara Rivers Cofield found two crumpled pieces of paper in the pocket of a dress from the 1880s. The cryptic messages led to a mystery, and a look into the history of weather forecasting.

Sara Rivers Cofield found two crumpled pieces of paper in the pocket of a dress from the 1880s. The cryptic messages led to a mystery, and a look into the history of weather forecasting.

Notes discovered in the pocket of an 1880s bustle dress were identified as coded telegraph messages containing weather data from May 27, 1888. The codes, deciphered by analyst Wayne Chan with help from NOAA, originated from about 20 weather stations across the U.S. and Canada and included information on temperature, pressure, wind, precipitation, and cloud cover.

The telegraph was the primary means of communicating weather information at the time, managed by the U.S. Army Signal Service. The discovery highlights the role of coded messages in early weather forecasting and suggests the dress's original owner was involved in this process.

Cryptic notes in dress pocket shed light on weather history

It's so universal that even though it's just a daily weather report, it's this much bigger picture about history in general and everybody's lives were impacted. Sarah Rivers-Cofield bought this 1880s bustle dress more than a decade ago to add to her collection of antique clothing. In a hidden pocket, though, she found two crumpled pieces of paper with a mishmash of words on them. Turns out it was a glimpse into weather forecasting history. So this one says, the top line is, Smith, Nostrum, Linnet, Get, None, Went. Being that it was 2013, Rivers-Cofield posted photos of the dress on her blog, mentioning the notes only in passing. Now a few people let her know the words were telegraph messages written in code in order to make them shorter. And then Rivers-Cofield pretty much forgot about the whole thing. But what I didn't know is that the code community had really glommed onto this. Unbeknownst to me, it got published as one of like the top 50 unbreakable codes in some list somewhere. And then Wayne Chan, an analyst at the University of Manitoba and an amateur codebreaker, took a deep dive. Chan's research led him to deduce these particular words were telegraph code for data collected from weather stations. And then his challenge became finding the right code books for sending weather reports, which wasn't terribly easy because at the time they were managed by the U.S. Army Signal Service. With help from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, and other resources, Chan decoded the messages and figured out when they were sent. May 27, 1888. At that time, the telegraph was the primary way to communicate weather information and it kick-started weather forecasting as we know it today. And it seems whoever owned Cofield Rivers-Dress was in some way involved in that process. The reports in the pocket came from about 20 different stations in the U.S. and Canada and included data on temperature, barometric pressure, wind, precipitation, cloud cover, etc. All of that in five words.

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