How William Friedman Tried to Prove That Francis Bacon Wrote Shakespeare's Plays

[MUSIC PLAYING] BILL SHERMAN: In the United States, the most consequential cryptographic advancements happened around the Japanese code called purple. And the man who broke purple was William Friedman. William Friedman did not start by studying 20th century codes. He started by studying Edgar Allan Poe, William Shakespeare, and Sir Francis Bacon.

And his first work in learning about how codes and ciphers work came through systematic introduction to the writings of Sir Francis Bacon. That was very much designed to serve a project that he himself did not believe in, which was to try to prove that Bacon had written Shakespeare's plays and had left behind coded messages saying that. And all of a sudden, they are turned to by the government to not only break cipher documents that were being sent to them but to use Bacon and these 16th, 17th century techniques to teach a whole new generation of military practical mathematically driven code breakers. And Friedman leads this team who is trained, taught to break the Japanese code. The Bacon-Shakespeare controversy with the teaching of Sir Francis Bacon, in particular, does absolutely change the course of the 20th century.

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