03/06/2024
March Women HIstory Month (Day 4 catchup!!!) I present a Shakespeare connection!!!
I have often heard of this woman who worked for local businessman Colonel Fabyan and his desire to prove Shakespeare was not the true author of his works. Hired to decipher his works and find coded messages....she eventually was assigned to more important missions during and after WWI.
Here is her story (credit Preservations Partners of the Fox Valley)
Elizebeth Smith-Friedman was born in 1892 and grew up on a farm near Huntington, Indiana. She earned an English Literature degree from Hillsdale College in 1915 and found herself at the Newberry Library in downtown Chicago the following year for a job opportunity in Shakespearean research. This opportunity turned out to not be with the library, but in Geneva at Riverbank Laboratories for the wealthy Colonel George Fabyan. The Colonel tasked Elizebeth and over a dozen other women to work under Elizabeth Wells Gallup to discover and solve a cipher by Sir Francis Bacon that was believed to be hidden within William Shakespeare’s writing. If true, the Colonel and Gallup believed the cipher would reveal that Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare’s work.[3]
During her work at Riverbank, Elizebeth met William Friedman, a plant geneticist Col. Fabyan had hired for his farming experiments but began working on the cipher project with Elizebeth. When the United States entered World War I in March of 1917, there was a tremendous need for codebreakers that the Army simply did not have. Colonel Fabyan offered his code-breaking team in Geneva and for the next nine months, Riverbank Laboratories received and broke all codes sent to it by the U.S. military, led by Elizebeth Smith and William Friedman. The two married at Riverbank on May 21, 1917.
After the war, Elizebeth went on to work for the Coast Guard to break the codes of liquor smugglers during Prohibition and then, during World War II, she worked on a team hunting down N***s in South America. Due to their extensive and early work in codebreaking, Elizebeth and her husband are known as the founders of the modern science of cryptoanalysis.
LEARN MORE ABOUT ELIZEBETH SMITH-FRIEDMAN AT THE GENEVA HISTORY MUSEUM ON MAY 14, 2024 AT 12PM.
