Smithy code facts for kids

The Smithy code is a secret message hidden inside a legal document. It was placed there by Mr Justice Peter Smith in April 2006. This happened during a court case about the book The Da Vinci Code. A lawyer named Dan Tench figured out the code that same month. Justice Smith even sent him clues by email to help him solve it.

How the Secret Code Works

The secret message was made using special letters in the court document. These letters were italicised, meaning they were slanted, unlike the rest of the text. If you pulled out all these italicised letters, they formed a long sequence:

s m i t h y c o d e J a e i e x t o s t g p s a c g r e a m q w f k a d p m q z v

These special italicised letters only appeared up to paragraph 43 in the document. The whole document was 71 pages long. Also, in paragraph 52, there was a hint: "The key to solving the conundrum posed by this judgment is in reading HBHG and DVC." HBHG stands for The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and DVC stands for The Da Vinci Code. These were the books involved in the court case.

Finding the Hidden Letters

The italicised letters were found within specific words in the judgment. For example, the first few letters came from words like:

• Claimants
• claimant
• is that his reality
• cynicism
• for
• preceded
• Templar

These letters were carefully chosen from different paragraphs throughout the document.

Clues to Solve the Code

A newspaper, The New York Times, reported that Justice Smith sent an email with a clue. He said the code was connected to his entry in "Who's Who." This is a book that lists important people in Britain. His entry mentioned his wife Diane, his three children Frazier, Parker, and Bailey, a British naval officer named Jackie Fisher, and the Titanic Historical Society. These names were all hints to help solve the puzzle.

Solving the Smithy Code

The Smithy code was a type of polyalphabetic cipher. This means it used more than one alphabet to hide the message. It was a specific kind called a Variant Beaufort cipher. To solve it, you needed a special keyword. This keyword was based on the Fibonacci sequence, which is a series of numbers where each number is the sum of the two before it (like 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21...).

The keyword for the Smithy code was AAYCEHMU. If you turn these letters into numbers based on their place in the alphabet, you get 1, 1, 25, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21. The number 25 (Y) was a special twist. It meant you had to count two letters backward instead of forward. This idea came from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail book. For example, if a coded letter was 'E' and the Fibonacci number was 2, it would become 'C' in the decoded message.

Jackie Fisher, a British admiral, in 1883. He later became First Sea Lord.

There were also a couple of small corrections needed for the code. The 10th coded letter, 'T', should have been an 'H'. Also, there should have been a 'Z' at the very end of the coded message.

The letters 'MQ' appeared twice in the coded message, exactly 8 letters apart. This was a big clue that the keyword was 8 letters long. This method of finding a keyword length is called a Kasiski test.

The full secret message, once decoded, read:

JACKIEFISHERWHOAREYOUDREADNOUGHT ("Jackie Fisher who are you? Dreadnought")

This message was a question about Jackie Fisher. He was a famous British admiral. He helped create the first modern battleship, HMS Dreadnought. This ship was very fast and had many big guns.

The complete court judgment document was once available online. You can find an archived copy of it here: archived copy of the judgment.