Seward’s Other Folly is a paper written by the historian Ralph E. Webber for the NSA’s internal professional journal, Cryptologic Quarterly. The paper recounts the travails faced by U.S. Secretary of State William Seward when, in 1866, he sent the first encrypted American cable from the United States to Paris.
The encoded Seward dispatch, termed a “pungent remonstrance to the French government” by The New York Herald, was given at 6 p.m. on 23 November to the manager of the War Department telegraph office, Charles A. Tkiner, for transmission. Tinker recalled the original dispatch was written only in figures and that cable office rules required him to spell out the figures in letters and transmit the letters and figures. He immediately sent for another operator to make a copy of the dispatch so that he might return the original to the State Department and still retain one for his files. Tinker began to transmit the dispatch by 6:15, and it was repeated back to his office so that by 12:15 a.m. the process was finished. It was the longest cable dispatch–3,7,22 words–he had ever sent.
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Seward’s confidential dispatch to Bigelow contained more than thirty-five transmission errors; some phrases were mistakenly repeated twice in the cablegram. Many of these errors occurred during the rewrite process when the cable clerk substituted words for the numbers; thus, for example, “1424” was incorrectly sent as “fourteen twenty six.” Seward’s original plaintext message of 780 words, when encoded, because 1,237 number groups with 88 additional code symbols, such as a cross and an arrow, spelled out. These groups and symbols plus the address were rendered into 3,722 words for transmission.
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Earlier State Department monthly bills in 1866 for using the domestic telegraph lines were modest: for example, those received for September that, with an eight percent discount, amounted to $73.79; for October, $76.34. The November telegraph bill amounted to $46.94. And then came the astonishing charges for the 23 November cable to Bigelow–$19,540.50. This cost together with other cables sent in November added up to $24,996.12, an amount equal to the yearly salary of the president of the United States and three times more than that paid the secretary of state. Secretary Seward was unwilling and unable to pay the cable charges.
Eventually, the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company sued the U.S. government to recover the money it was owed for this and four other cables.
The case was heard before the Court of Claims in Washington, D.C., on 26 May 1871. In its “Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law,” the court found that the data presented by the claimants were correct, that the secretary of state had paid charges for twenty-three cables (of which seven were encrypted) at regular rates and that refused to pay five other cable charges, all of them encrypted. Moreover, the company had paid $21,804.90 in gold coin to the connecting lines and was owed this amount plus $10,435.85 for transmission over its own lines, for the total of $32,240.75.
The court decided for the claimant in that amount. The State Department had one victory: payment in gold was not required. Rather, the judgment had to be rendered “in the usual form in dollars and cents, without distinguishing the kind of money in which it shall be paid.” Promptly, the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company’s treasurer, Moses Taylor, wrote to the secretary of the treasury requesting that the judgment be immediately paid, or five percent interested be added until paid. He enclosed a certified transcript of the judgment. And finally, on 28 August 1871, almost five years after the Seward-Bigelow cable, the Comptroller’s Office paid the full amount in dollars and cents.