New Gorhambury

Experimental Results Data Dump · Biliteral Cipher · September 2, 2026

One day's progress, presented three ways.
Riverbank Laboratories said in 1916 that the italic w in Shakespeare's First Folio comes in two shapes. We went and looked.

A record of one day's work · findings may be superseded by later dumps

The short version

In 1899 an American cryptanalyst named Elizabeth Wells Gallup said she had found a hidden message inside the First Folio of Shakespeare — not in the words, but in the shapes of the letters. Two slightly different italic typefaces, alternating, spelling out a binary code devised by Sir Francis Bacon.

Almost everyone has considered this as nonsense for a century. Almost nobody has measured it. That is the whole of what this project does.

Today's result in one sentence. Riverbank's own 1916 manual says the two forms of the letter w differ in a specific, checkable way — and at the two places it says to look, on the actual page, they do.

Questions

What is the biliteral cipher?

Sir Francis Bacon described it in 1623. Every letter of the alphabet becomes a group of five symbols, each symbol either an a or a b — binary code, three centuries before binary code. A is aaaaa, B is aaaab, and so on.

The trick is that the two symbols need not be letters at all. They can be two founts of type so similar that a reader notices nothing. Print an innocent passage in an alternating mixture of the two, and the shapes of the letters carry a second message underneath the first.

So what is actually being tested here?

Not whether Bacon wrote Shakespeare. Something much narrower and much more answerable: is the italic type on these pages one fount, or two?

That is a question about metal, ink and paper, settled in 1623. It has a definite answer, the photographs are free and public, and anybody with the same images can check the working or overturn it.

It is also the necessary condition. If there is only one fount, the whole claim dies where no amount of argument can reach it. If there are two, nothing about Bacon follows — but a fact about the book would be established that nobody currently knows.

What did you actually find?

Riverbank published a manual in 1916 telling students how to tell the two forms apart, letter by letter. For the lowercase w in the Prologue to Troilus and Cressida, the rule is that the a-form ends open and the b-form has its final stroke closed into a small loop.

The same manual lists exactly where to find one of each: the w in the word with on line 4, and the w in drawing on line 12.

We fetched both from the Bodleian Library's public photographs of the book. The first is open. The second is looped. The rule holds where they said it would.

Does that mean the cipher is real?

No. Two letters confirm that the described difference exists and can be seen. They do not show that it sorts every w in the passage, and they say nothing whatever about whether a message is present.

What it does mean is that the first checkable thing anyone has said about this claim in 127 years turned out to be checkable, and true.

Why does a loop matter more than any other difference?

Because a hole is either there or it is not.

Most of the differences Riverbank describes are subtle — a stroke slightly wider, a curve commencing nearer the top. Four hundred years of ink spread, paper age and printing pressure blur that kind of detail beyond recovery, which is exactly why this argument has never been settled.

An enclosed loop is different in kind. A computer can count holes with near-certainty regardless of how heavily the page was inked. The w may be the one letter in the alphabet where the question can be answered cleanly.

Isn't this just believing what a Baconian told you?

It would be, if we were using Gallup's answers to check Gallup's method. We are not.

The rule being tested is Riverbank's own published rule. The locations are Riverbank's own published locations. The photographs are the Bodleian Library's, made for entirely unrelated reasons. And the measurement is a hole count, which has no opinion.

The instrument we want to use next was built at Carnegie Mellon and UC San Diego to catch anonymous seventeenth-century printers. It has never heard of Elizabeth Wells Gallup. That neutrality is not a convenience — it is a large part of the evidence.

What would change your mind?

Written down in advance, before any of this ran:

  • If every w in the passage turns out to be the same shape, the claim is dead.
  • If ordinary text from elsewhere in the book — pages nobody claims carry a cipher — comes back looking just as two-formed, then the method is manufacturing structure and every result of ours is worthless.
  • If the classification only works when it is told the answer in advance, it proves nothing.

A negative gets published in the same terms as a positive. That was decided before the data was looked at, and it is the whole difference between an audit and an advocacy.

Who is doing this and why?

Walter Wilkinson, Worland, Wyoming. The overall project encompasses Orville Owen's Word Cipher; this is its sister strand.

The reason it has merit is that the question has stayed arguable for 127 years purely because nobody measured it — and until about six years ago, nobody easily could. The photographs went online free. The statistical machinery got built for another purpose entirely. Both halves now exist, and no one had put them together.

The wider project lives at New Gorhambury, which collects the sources, the experiments and the Word Cipher work. Experiment One is this dump's direct ancestor — Friedman's 1916 decoding of this same Prologue, redone in Python on these same Bodleian scans. Worth knowing before you read it: that page argues a conclusion. These dumps deliberately do not. The difference is the point of publishing them daily.