How the US Started Code Breaking | The Codebreaker | American Experience | PBS

Summary

The invention of radio made codebreaking crucial, but America lacked a formal agency at the start of WWI. Elizebeth and William Friedman, tasked with this challenge at Riverbank, learned on the job, distinguishing between codes and ciphers and using frequency analysis. Their innovative methods, documented in the Riverbank Publications, established a mathematical and statistical foundation for cryptology, transforming it from a linguistic pursuit into a scientific discipline.