The mystery of the US military in an ancient dress for nearly 150 years

An antique dress purchased a decade ago contains mysterious encrypted messages from the 19th century, revealing that this is a weather observation tool for the US Army's Information Corps.

This discovery helps people better understand historical meteorological observations.

In 2013, Sara Rivers Cofield saw a brown dress for sale at an antique mall in Maine.

As an archaeologist and a collector of old dresses and handbags, Sara immediately fell in love with the metal buttons and intricate lace of the dress.

When buying the dress to take home, Sara discovered a secret pocket hidden under the bra, inside the seam of the dress. The bag contained crumpled pieces of paper.

The collared dress contains a mysterious message. (Photo: Sara Rivers Cofield/Commitment to Costumes).

Mrs. Sara believes that both the dress and the paper could be from the 1880s, but she cannot fully understand the meaning of the messages written on them.

According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), some of the text begins with a place name, followed by seemingly random verbs and nouns.

Ms. Sara described the findings on her personal blog: "In addition, there are numbers in between the lines, each line is marked with a different color and there are strange notes, like the time spent outside margin like 10 o'clock, 11:13 p.m. and 11:24 p.m. I feel like these clues are actually talking about some kind of code."

Mysterious code lines on the antique dress. (Photo: Sara Rivers Cofield/Commitment to Costumes).

After Ms. Sara posted her call for decoding online, online forums around the world such as Reddit offered many different theories, from love notes to outfit measurements, even illegal gambling. wartime code or code.

However, more experienced antique dealers and decoding experts have rejected these assumptions. Some have suggested that this may have been some kind of telegraph code related to the new communications infrastructure that began to spread around the world in the 1800s.

According to NOAA, the invention of the telegraph changed the way news was shared in the mid-1800s, helping people send messages from town to town quickly.

(Photo: Sara Rivers Cofield/Commitment to Costumes).

Researcher Wayne Chan from the University of Manitoba (Canada) explained in an article: "Since telegraph companies charged by the number of words in a telegram, people have come up with many conventional code words to reduce number from down".

However, Mr. Wayne Chan and many other experts still could not determine the type of code on the dress. This case has been ranked among the 50 most mysterious codes in the world in the past decade.

Determined to decode the above mystery, Mr. Wayne Chan read 170 books about telegraphy. Then he decided to learn more about the era of the telegraph.

Finally, Mr. Wayne discovered in an old book the content of weather codes used by the US Army Information Corps. In it, the researcher noticed similar examples of coding on the dress, leading him to believe that the code was related to the weather.

The location of the pocket containing the mysterious codes is in the lining of the dress. (Photo: Sara Rivers Cofield/Commitment to Costumes).

According to experts, the advent of the telegraph revolutionized weather forecasting , allowing weather news to be transmitted long distances. But to save costs, meteorological variables need to be shortened into code.

Therefore, the code on the silk dress may have been used by the US Army Information Department from 1870 to 1891. This department was also the predecessor of the National Weather Service under NOAA.

Based on some available documents, Mr. Wayne Chan concluded that the messages came from meteorological stations of the Military Information Department in the US and Canada . Each written line provides information about the weather observed at a certain location and time of day. This information was telegraphed to the headquarters of the US Army Information Office in Washington, DC.

In short, according to Mr. Wayne Chan, this is the weather code used by the US Army Information Corps during the period 1870-1891 . Researching further, he determined that those weather observations were made on May 27, 1888.

There are still some related mysteries that remain unsolved. For example, NOAA doesn't know who owns the dress or why the person stuffed the weather code in said bag.

Mrs. Sara said that this was not the type of dress to wear to a ball. It was more like work clothes of the time. According to Mr. Wayne Chan, there were a number of women working at the Army Signal Office offices in Washington in the 1880s.

A small label stating the name "Bennett" is inside the dress. (Photo: Sara Rivers Cofield/Commitment to Costumes).

There was a small label found inside the dress that read "Bennett". However, researchers found no information about any woman named Bennett who worked here.

Meanwhile, a man named Maitland Bennett is said to have worked as a clerk there during the said period and his wife may have owned the dress.

However, the woman was eight months pregnant at the time of the coded weather observations, so it was unlikely she would have worn it.

Ms. Sara exclaimed: "Everyone loves mystery!".