Edward Hebern

Edward Hugh lifters ( born April 23, 1869 in Streator, Illinois, † February 10, 1952 ) was an American cryptologist. He invented one of the first rotor cipher machines.

Life

As a toddler pulled lifters to Bloomington (Illinois ) before he lived at the age of 14 on a farm near the city of Odin and worked. Later he worked as a carpenter. He died at the age of 82 years to a heart attack.

Work

In 1917 he invented one of the first rotor cipher machines. This happened just before independently three other inventors from three other countries anmeldeten their own ideas to rotor machines for a patent. This was for the German Arthur Scherbius in 1918, and Hugo Koch from the Netherlands and Sweden Arvid Gerhard Damm, who registered their patents in 1919. Due to unfortunate circumstances lifters could his invention until 1921 to submit for a patent, and later as Scherbius, cooking and dam.

Lifters started a company in California to market its " jacks - rotor machine." A his staff was Agnes Meyer, who in 1923, the U.S. Navy in Washington, DC left to work for lifters.

Heberns rotor - key machine proved (similar later the German ENIGMA ) to be less secure than anticipated against unauthorized decoding. The American cryptologist William F. Friedman was able to uncover cryptographic weaknesses of the " lifters " principle, after the method of the U.S. government had been offered. Heberns company made no great economic success, so soon Agnes Meyer returned back to Washington to continue working since 1924 for the U.S. Navy.

Friedman subsequently developed a much more complicated and cryptographically significantly better rotor cipher machine, which should play an important role in the Second World War and could never be broken. She became famous under the name Sigaba.