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Riverbank, the private estate where American codebreaking started
1915
Geneva, Illinois
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
George Fabyan made a fortune in textiles and spent much of it running a private research estate on the Fox River, with Frank Lloyd Wright remodelling the family house in 1907. Fabyan put William and Elizebeth Friedman on the payroll to work on a theory that Francis Bacon had hidden ciphers in Shakespeare, and the pair ended up inventing the mathematics of codebreaking instead. Through the First World War this estate handled the bulk of American military cipher work, because the government had no unit of its own yet. The National Security Agency has since recognised it as the birthplace of American cryptology.
That was 1 of the hidden places.
Location: historic site
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