The Mystery of the Bustle Dress Cipher

There’s a certain thrill to digging through the past—whether it’s in a dusty attic, an archaeological site, or, in Sara Rivers Cofield’s case, an antique mall in Maine. At first glance, she thought she had simply stumbled upon a rust-colored 1880s bustle dress tucked away like an overlooked treasure. In reality, she unearthed a hidden cipher that would stump codebreakers worldwide for nearly a decade.

Let’s take a closer look at how a hidden note tucked inside a silk pocket unraveled a fascinating piece of 19th-century history.

Hidden Pockets and Hidden Ciphers

Sara began collecting antique fashion as a child, starting with purses and discovering the occasional wheat penny or pendant inside. But a dress? That was a new frontier. “Most of the dresses I have don’t even have pockets,” she says. This one did—a secret pocket nestled amidst the rustling silk layers. Inside was a note scrawled in what looked like gibberish. Multiple lines over two pieces of paper such as:

“Helena onus lofo us nail each / Green Bay nobby piped.”

and

“Cairo rural lining new Johnson none.”

Intrigued, she posted the puzzle on her blog, inviting amateur cryptographers to crack the secret code. It gained internet fame, landing on lists of the world’s top 50 unsolved codes. For years, people attempted to decipher the note, but it wasn’t until 2022 that Wayne Chan, a Canadian hobbyist with a knack for puzzles, finally solved the riddle. What he uncovered wasn’t espionage or a scandalous love affair but something that revolutionized everyday life in the 1880s: weather forecasting.

Cracking the Code: Meteorology History and a Forecast for the Ages

Chan, a computer analyst with the Centre for Earth Observation Science at the University of Manitoba, is no stranger to patterns and puzzles. Over holiday breaks, he poured over the mysterious dress cipher, convinced it was a telegraph secret code. After four years and 170 dusty codebooks, he struck gold.

The note, dated May 27, 1888, was a shorthand weather forecasting report sent to the United States Signal Corps—an agency that would later evolve into today’s National Weather Service. In the late 19th century, telegraphed weather data was revolutionary. It allowed people to predict storms, protect crops from sudden freezes, and prepare for dangerous conditions. This particular note, and countless others like it, marked the dawn of modern meteorology.

Citizen Science in Meteorological History

Before weather stations, Doppler radar, and NOAA satellites, Americans relied on old adages like “red sky at night, sailor’s delight” (read about the origin of that phrase here) for weather forecasting. Not exactly science. By the mid-1800s, however, tools like barometers and anemometers began to refine how weather was measured. Telegraph operators and citizen scientists played a crucial role in this early era of forecasting, relaying weather observations across the country.

“Around 200 stations in the U.S. and Canada transmitted weather reports at least three times daily,” Chan explains. These six-word telegrams were marvels of efficiency, encoding barometric pressure, dew point, temperature, cloud cover, and wind direction. Meteorologists compiled the data, drew up weather maps, and distributed them to newspapers within hours. This was cutting-edge science, 1880s style.

Code in a Dress: A Fashionable Mystery

The dress’s role in this saga raises questions as intriguing as the cipher itself. Who hid the note, and why? The dress bore a name tag—“Bennett”—but no definitive link to NOAA’s predecessor could be made. Rivers Cofield speculates it might have belonged to the wife of a telegraph worker, saved as scrap paper during laundry. “Paper was precious then,” she notes. “It could have even been used as a baby wipe,” since one of the likely women was pregnant at the time.

While the true story of the dress remains elusive, Rivers Cofield is captivated by the broader historical implications. “This was more revealing about everyday life in the 1880s to me than any collection I’ve worked with,” she says. “It’s not just a dress—it’s a snapshot of how people lived, worked, and communicated.”

The Weather Forecasting Whisperers of Yesteryear

Deciphering weather patterns was as groundbreaking in the 19th century as cracking the genetic code would be in the 20th. Alison Gillespie of NOAA points out that these early efforts laid the foundation for modern meteorology. “Volunteers and scientists worked hand-in-hand to piece together patterns that we take for granted today,” she says.

The invention of the telegraph in 1837 jump-started this field, as operators began to notice correlations between weather reports from the west and what arrived a few hours later. This early citizen science blossomed into a formalized system by the 1880s, with coded weather reports forming the backbone of the nation’s first forecasting network.

Bustles, Barometers, and a Bit of Wonder

Today, we can pull up a week’s worth of weather predictions with a swipe of a finger. But in 1888, knowing tomorrow’s weather was revolutionary. For Rivers Cofield, what began as a fascination with fashion has turned into a deeper appreciation for the ingenuity of the past. “I don’t care what the weather was on May 27, 1888,” she says, “but I care deeply about how it changed people’s lives.”

From mysterious ciphers to forgotten pioneers of meteorology, this story proves one thing: history is all around us—sometimes hiding in the silk folds of a bustle dress, just waiting to be rediscovered.

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