A woman bought a vintage dress. It had a secret pocket with a mysterious note
Submitted 1 year ago by bot@lemmy.smeargle.fans [bot] to hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/15/us/antique-dress-maine-encrypted-message-cec/index.html
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 1 year ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As a vintage costume collector, Rivers Cofield recognized it as a dress from the 1880s — but despite its age, its delicate embroidery, bronze silk and metallic buttons appeared intact.
Inside a secret pocket tucked under the bustle were two crumpled sheets of paper with lists of seemingly random words and places:
Rivers Cofield, an archeological curator who lives in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, had bought the dress while visiting her mother in Searsport, Maine.
Others speculated it was a form of communication related to the telegraph, a new way of sending quick notes launched in the United States in the 1800s, which charged senders a fee based on the number of words in a message.
Each word represented meteorological variables such as temperature, wind speed and barometric pressure at a specific location and time of day.
“Leafage” referred to a dew point of 32 degrees Fahrenheit observed at 10 p.m. “Buck” indicated there was no precipitation, while “bank” meant a wind velocity of 12 mph and a clear sunset.
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