The Dublin Roller Mills was a well run establishment that produced flour and corn meal. The business was run by J. F. Wieser & Company. In their advertisement in the 1903-1905 Texas Central Shippers Guide, it mentioned they used the Robinson’s Cipher for their telegram transactions.
A cipher was an encoding system where messages sent over telegraph could be made more private and reduce the number of characters sent. Reducing the number of characters reduced the cost to send the telegram. What looked like a set of random words was actually a carefully planned order. When the order was sent to any business who also had the Robinson’s CipherBook,theirtransaction could be translated back into a readable form.
It doesn’t seem that telegrams were very private at the time. The telegrapher would see the original, it was sent to another telegrapher and it would pass through multiple hands before a paper copy was ever delivered to the recipient.
It seems that the Robinson Cipher was mostly used by those dealing with commodities. When ordering thousands of dollars of a product, just one telegraph character not being sent correctly, could mess up the entire order.
An example of ordering wheat using the cipher would look like this: “Abaft, Achieve, Blaspheme” translated reads, Buy 250 bbls. Number 2 Spring Wheat, March delivery.
I have included portions of the Robinson’s Cipher book so you can see how it was decoded. “Abaft” was the code word for “Buy __ Number 2 Spring Wheat.” “Achieve” was the code word for “250 bbls.” “Blaspheme” was the code word for “March.”
You can see the telgraph words used and their translation above.
For Dublin Historical Society information scan here!