History
Edward Hugh Hebern was a building contractor who was jailed in 1908 for stealing a horse. It is claimed that, with time on his hands, he started thinking about the problem of encryption, and eventually devised a means of mechanizing the process with a typewriter. At the time he had no funds to be able to spend time working on such a device, but he dusted off his thinking in 1917, built a sample, and patented it in 1918. Agnes Driscoll, the chief civilian employee of the US Navy's cryptography operation (later to become OP-20-G) between WWI and WWII, spent some time working with Hebern before returning to Washington and OP-20-G in the mid-'20s.
Hebern was so convinced of the future success of the system that he formed the Hebern Electric Code company with money from several investors. Over the next few years he repeatedly tried to sell the machines both to the US Navy and Army, as well as to commercial interests such as banks. None was terribly interested, as at the time cryptography was not widely considered important outside governments. It was probably because of William F. Friedman's confidential analysis of the Hebern machine's weaknesses (substantial, though repairable) that its sales to the US government were so limited; Hebern was never told of them. Perhaps the best indication of a general distaste for such matters was the statement by Henry Stimson in his memoirs that "gentlemen should not read each other's mail". It was Stimson, as Secretary of State under Hoover, who withdrew State Department support for Herbert Yardley's American Black Chamber, leading to its closing.
Eventually his investors ran out of patience, and sued Hebern for stock manipulation. He spent another brief period in jail, but never gave up on the idea of his machine. In 1931 the Navy finally purchased several systems, but this was to be his only real sale.
There were three other patents for rotor machines issued in 1919, and several other rotor machines were designed independently at about the same time. The most successful and widely used was the Enigma machine.
Read more about this topic: Hebern Rotor Machine
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