Overview

In the 17th century a natural philosopher who made a discovery faced a dilemma: announcing it openly invited a rival to reproduce and claim it, but staying silent forfeited priority if someone else published first. A common solution was to publish the result in scrambled form. The author reduced a Latin sentence stating the discovery to an alphabetized jumble of its letters (an anagram), or to a count of how many times each letter occurs (a letter-frequency cipher). The scrambled string was printed or mailed to trusted witnesses with a fixed date, and only the author knew the sentence it unscrambled to. When ready, the author revealed the plaintext, and the earlier dated scramble established their priority. It is a hand-built cryptographic commitment: it hides the result while binding the author to one exact answer, with a dated document as the timestamp.

How it worked

The scramble does two things at once, the same pair a modern cryptographic commitment provides:

• It HIDES the discovery. The jumble reveals nothing on its own, so a competitor learns only that the author claims to have found something.
• It BINDS the author to a single answer. A valid solution must be a meaningful sentence whose letters alphabetize to the identical string, so the author cannot quietly substitute a different result later.

The dated letter or printed pamphlet is the timestamp: it fixes that this result was held by this person no later than this date, without disclosing it. Revealing the plaintext is the act of opening the commitment.

Notable examples

• Galileo Galilei, the “triple” form of Saturn (1610). Galileo circulated the anagram smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenugttauiras and, at Kepler’s urging, revealed it in a letter to Giuliano de’ Medici dated 13 November 1610 as Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi (“I have observed the highest planet to be threefold”). His telescope could not resolve Saturn’s rings, so the planet looked triple; Huygens later explained the shape as a ring.
• Kepler’s mis-solution (1610). Trying to crack Galileo’s scramble, Johannes Kepler read it instead as a claim that Mars has two moons, a reading that happened to match his numerical expectation of 1, 2, and 4 moons for Earth, Mars, and Jupiter. It was wrong as a solution, and it exposes the technique’s weakness: a natural-language jumble has many plausible readings. (Mars does have two moons, but they were not discovered until 1877.)
• Galileo, the phases of Venus (1610 to 1611). Here the carrier was itself a misleading sentence, Haec immatura a me iam frustra leguntur o y (“these are as yet too immature to be read by me”), whose letters rearrange to Cynthiae figuras aemulatur mater amorum (“Venus imitates the phases of the Moon”). Galileo disclosed it around 1 January 1611; the observation supported a Sun-centered arrangement over the pure Ptolemaic model.
• Christiaan Huygens, the moon Titan (1655). Having found Saturn’s largest moon, Huygens concealed it behind a line borrowed from Ovid, Admovere oculis distantia sidera nostris, plus extra letters, all anagramming to Saturno luna sua circumducitur diebus sexdecim horis quatuor (“a moon is carried around Saturn in sixteen days and four hours”). He revealed it in the 1656 pamphlet De Saturni Luna observatio nova.
• Christiaan Huygens, the ring of Saturn (1656, revealed 1659). Appended to that same pamphlet was the jumble aaaaaaacccccdeeeeeghiiiiiiillllmmnnnnnnnnnooooppqrrstttttuuuuu, disclosed three years later in Systema Saturnium as Annulo cingitur, tenui, plano, nusquam cohaerente, ad eclipticam inclinato (“girded by a thin, flat ring, nowhere touching the planet, inclined to the ecliptic”), finally explaining Galileo’s puzzle.
• Robert Hooke, the law of elasticity (1676, revealed 1678). Hooke ended his 1676 Description of Helioscopes with ceiiinosssttuv, revealed two years later as Ut tensio, sic vis (“as the extension, so the force”), the proportionality now called Hooke’s law. He said he had known it for years but published the cipher to secure priority while withholding the result.
• Isaac Newton, the method of fluxions (1676). In his Epistola Posterior to Leibniz (via Henry Oldenburg, dated 24 October 1676), Newton hid his calculus method as a letter-count cipher, 6accdae13eff7i3l9n4o4qrr4s8t12ux, encoding Data aequatione quotcunque fluentes quantitates involvente, fluxiones invenire; et vice versa (“given an equation involving any number of fluent quantities, to find the fluxions, and conversely”). It later featured in the Newton and Leibniz priority dispute.

Transcriptions vary slightly in period orthography, where u and v were treated as one letter: Hooke’s cipher also appears as ceiiinosssttuu and Newton’s as 6accdae13eff7i3l9n4o4qrr4s8t12vx. The exact leftover letters appended to Huygens’s Titan carrier line are not firmly pinned down across sources.

Relevance to Truestamp

These scrambles are an early ancestor of cryptographic proof-of-existence, and Truestamp is one modern member of the same long lineage rather than its endpoint. The anagram is a hide-and-bind commitment with a dated document as its timestamp, which is exactly the pattern a hash-based commitment provides, done with Latin letters instead of a hash function. Hooke’s two-year gap between the 1676 cipher and the 1678 reveal even behaves like a submission window: the result provably existed between those dates while its content stayed private. Kepler’s mis-solution shows why the informal version is weak where the cryptographic one is strong: a natural-language jumble has low entropy and several plausible pre-images, so it is neither collision-resistant nor exclusively openable, which is precisely the guarantee a hash commitment adds to this centuries-old idea of proving a result existed without revealing it.

Citations

1. Huygens’s Saturn-ring anagram (also covers Galileo, Hooke, and Newton). Encyclopedic overview of the priority-anagram tradition with the exact strings and solutions.
2. Galileo Galilei’s Anagram. Rutgers University Physics: the Venus-phases anagram, exact strings, and translations.
3. Hooke’s law. The ceiiinosssttuv cipher and its 1678 revelation as “ut tensio, sic vis”.
4. The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 188: Newton to Oldenburg, 24 October 1676. Cambridge University Press: the Epistola Posterior containing the fluxions cipher.
5. Huygens Discovers Luna Saturni. NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day: the Titan anagram, its Ovid carrier line, and solution.
6. From ciphers to confidentiality: secrecy, openness and priority in science. British Journal for the History of Science: the institutional context of ciphers and sealed notes for priority.
7. How a Misinterpreted Anagram Predicted the Moons of Mars. On Kepler’s mis-solution of Galileo’s Saturn anagram.