Q 01/05

Which Roman general guarded military messages by shifting each letter three places, so A became D?

A) Mark Antony

B) Julius Caesar

C) Pompey

D) Crassus

Answer · why

B) Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar's shift is easy to undo, and its 13-place cousin ROT13 was later used on Usenet to hide joke punchlines and spoilers.

Q 02/05

The word cryptography pairs an ancient root for 'writing' with one meaning what?

A) Sacred

B) Twisted

C) Counted

D) Hidden

Answer · why

D) Hidden

Hidden is the sense of kryptos, the root that opens the word, so cryptography literally means hidden writing; the CIA's Kryptos sculpture borrows the ...

Q 03/05

Which scholar announced in Paris in 1822 that he could read the Egyptian scripts on the Rosetta Stone?

A) Karl Richard Lepsius

B) Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy

C) Thomas Young

D) Jean-François Champollion

Answer · why

D) Jean-François Champollion

Jean-François Champollion showed that hieroglyphs spelled sounds as well as pictures, a trick the stone's Demotic text had already revealed for foreig...

Q 04/05

Which German engineer's firm patented the rotor cipher machine in 1918 that went on sale as Enigma?

A) Arthur Scherbius

B) Hugo Alexander Koch

C) Boris Hagelin

D) Edward Hebern

Answer · why

A) Arthur Scherbius

Arthur Scherbius co-founded Scherbius & Ritter, which patented the design in 1918 and began selling the finished machine under the Enigma name in 1923...

Q 05/05

When Enigma went on sale in 1923, which buyers was the machine first aimed at?

A) Intelligence services

B) Foreign embassies

C) Commercial firms

D) Police forces

Answer · why

C) Commercial firms

Commercial firms were the first target: the machine was pitched to businesses wanting to shield telegrams from rivals, and only later did the German a...