Remembering Elizebeth S. Friedman, Cryptanalyst

Elizebeth S. Friedman graduated from Hillsdale College in 1915 with a B.A. in English, an annotated volume of Tennyson that she kept until her death, and an interest in Shakespeare that unexpectedly resulted in a long career in cryptography.

Elizebeth was born on August 26, 1892 in Huntington, Ind. to John Marion Smith and Sopha Strock Smith. As the youngest of nine children, she was only one of two to attend college. In 1911, she left for Wooster College in Ohio, but transferred to Hillsdale two years later.

After graduation, she traveled to Chicago in hopes of finding work seeing the Newberry Library’s 1623 Shakespeare First Folio. A librarian mentioned her to the wealthy and eccentric Col. George Fabyan, who ran a personal research facility in Geneva, Ill. He drove to Chicago that day, hired Elizebeth, and brought her back to Riverbank Laboratories. She became a research assistant to Elizabeth Wells Gallup, who hoped to prove that Sir Francis Bacon not only authored Shakespeare’s plays, but also hid a bilateral cipher inside.

One of the geneticists on staff, a Russian-born Jew from Pittsburgh named William Friedman, was brought in to photograph manuscripts. Elizebeth quickly peaked his interest in ciphers, and a short while later, they fell in love and were married by a Rabbi in Chicago.

“If you know anything about modern intelligence or cryptography, he’s the big name,” said Col. Rose Mary Sheldon, author of the guide to the Friedman collection at the George C. Marshall Foundation. “He’s the man who invented the word cryptanalysis. That’s how back in the beginning it was.”