Secrets Kept

Two gifted men, each with a similar legacy. Neither had an equal, and both possessed gifts now lost to time.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Since the beginning of time,

(00:29):
civilizations all over the world have found new and innovative
ways of telling time. The sun dial, which calculated the
time of day for ancient Egyptians using the sun's position
in the sky, is one of the oldest techniques we
know of. The Saxons cut candles into sections, with each
segment meant to burn for just one hour. As time advanced,

(00:52):
so too did the methods by which people measure it.
It was in the late hundreds when the first mechanical
clock chimed for the world. Although the device has been
lost to history, we can get a good idea about
how it might have functioned thanks to the Salisbury Cathedral
in Italy, which boasts the oldest working clock in the world.
As with most new inventions, early clocks tended to have flaws.

(01:15):
They were notoriously inaccurate and complicated due to their use
of weights, which made them too large for the average house.
Churches were the primary locations for most mechanical clocks until
the coiled spring was invented in the mid fifteenth century,
allowing clockmakers to shrink them down to a more manageable
and accurate size. Later on, new materials and techniques were added. Pendulums,

(01:40):
hair springs, quartz, and magnets all found their way into
these machines, bringing their costs down and allowing them to
live in our homes and even on our wrists. Over
the centuries, they've transformed from enormous structures to mass produced commodities.
And that's the funny thing about the common clock. We

(02:00):
don't really think about it anymore. We expected to be
there on the wall or on our wrist were now
on our cell phones. We've never had a reason to
ask the biggest question of all, why can't we tell time?
Our bodies are capable of incredible things like creating life
and healing our own wounds, but counting the seconds to

(02:22):
the same degree as a ten dollar watch is impossible.
Some extraordinary people are capable of hearing a tone and
telling you exactly what musical note it is. Others have
photographic memories so vast they're able to recall ten year
old conversations word for word, as though they were reciting
lines from a play. But an accurate internal clock has

(02:45):
alluded our evolution for millennia, at least until eighteen, when J. D.
Chevallet demonstrated his unique talent for telling time. He developed
it as a child, when he began counting the intervals
between bell chimes and pendulum vibrations of the clocks around him.
He once gathered a crowd on a steamboat on Lake

(03:07):
Geneva and told them he could calculate any number of
minutes or seconds that they called out without fail. When
the time had passed, he would announce it with startling accuracy,
while a spectator with a watch verified his claim. He
was never wrong. What's more amazing is that he did
this while carrying on conversations with members of the crowd.

(03:29):
His internal clock was wound so tightly nothing could throw
it off. He once said of his gift, I have acquired,
by imitation, labor and patience, a movement which neither thoughts,
nor labor, nor anything can stop. Not much else's known
about Chevallet. He'd had his fifteen minutes of fame, which

(03:51):
I'm sure he counted down to the second and wasn't
heard from again. Telling time better than a wristwatch is
a fun party trick, and that's something to earn a
living on, though I do wonder why no one else
has come forward with a similar ability. Perhaps our reliance
on technology has made such a talent unnecessary. Maybe our

(04:13):
memories will go next as we rely on the internet
to do all of our remembering for us. Or maybe J. D.
Chevallet was just born at the right time in the
right place, like he'd been destined to become the perfect
human clock. After all, he was Swiss. Most people already

(04:46):
know of James Joyce, the Irish author of some of
the most beloved books of all time. Ulysses, Dubliners and
A Portrait of the Artist as a young Man have
found their way to numerous best of lists, as well
as high schoo curriculums all over the world. It's that
last title, a Portrait of the Artist as a young Man,
that's particularly special because of one character. Grandly Grantly, is

(05:12):
described in the book as the main character's best friend
at university and someone content with the status quo. He
has not called to greatness the way his friend is,
which is odd because the man the character was based on,
did some pretty great things in his own life. His
name was John F. Byrne, or JF as he was known,

(05:32):
and he attended college with James Joyce. They became good
friends over the years, so it seemed fitting for Joyce
to write him into one of his books. But why
he made Burn such a pushover, we'll never know. You see. J. F.
Byrne was, among other things, an inventor. In nineteen eighteen,
he devised a secret code system using nothing more than

(05:54):
a cigar box and a few bits and bobs from
around the house. He called his invention the Chaos Cipher,
which sounds a bit like a weapon a supervillain might
use against Superman, but it's really more benign than that, well,
unless you're sneaking messages across enemy lines and you don't
want the opposition to know what you've written. The Chao
Cipher consisted of two discs side by side, each disc

(06:16):
rotating on a spindle. A mixed up version of the
alphabet was written along the outer edge of each disc,
and as you turn it, the other would move in
the opposite direction, similar to the gears on a clock.
As each letter was enciphered, the alphabet shifted again, making
the encoded message practically impossible to decipher without the algorithm.

(06:37):
Now you would think such a method for inciphering messages
would earn top dollar from anyone wanting the utmost security
for their classified communic case, burn took his cigar box
to the top cryptoanalysts of the U. S. Army Signal Corps,
the U. S. State Department, the Navy, and even a
T and T, but no one wanted anything to do

(06:58):
with the Chao cipher. But Burne was resourceful, as he'd
clearly demonstrated, and he decided to put his little box
to the test. He compiled a book of popular texts
that he had enciphered and then challenged readers to crack
the codes. In his nineteen fifty three autobiography, he enciphered
a message using the Chao cipher and offered five thousand

(07:19):
dollars to anyone able to break it. Not a single
person was able to decode the booklet or the message.
He even mailed copies to the American Cryptogram Association and
the New York Cipher Society, groups whose members spent their
lives encoding and decoding secret messages using all sorts of
tricky methods, but Burne's Chao Cipher proved too difficult for

(07:43):
anyone brave enough to face it, and then in April
of nineteen sixty, Burne passed away, taking his algorithm with
him to the grave. No one had come close to
solving the Chao Cipher's mysteries. In the decades following Burne's death,
The passage within his autobiography was still enciphered, as was

(08:04):
the small booklet he published of known texts. It seems
his cigar box and the secrets inside it were lost forever,
and no one knew how any of it worked well,
almost no one. J F. Byrne, perhaps knowing what he'd
created was too much for anyone to figure out on
their own, passed his knowledge down to his son John

(08:28):
before his death in two thousand ten, almost one hundred
years since the device's inception, John donated his father's work
to the National Cryptographic Museum in Fort Meade, Maryland. In
doing so, he proved two things. First, unlike the James
Joyce character based on him, j F. Byrne had never

(08:50):
been one to uphold the status quo. And second, truth
is definitely stranger than fiction. I hope you've enjoyed today's
guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free
on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by
visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by

(09:15):
me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I
make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast,
book series, and television show, and you can learn all
about it over at the World of Lore dot com.
And until next time, stay curious.