CODED MESSAGES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20582, 4 December 1928, Page 7

CODED MESSAGES.

A.NEW ZEALAND INVENTION

ACCEPTED BY THE ADMIRALTY.

<Speciaj. xo Daily Times.)

AUCKLAND, December 3. With the comforting reflection that he r ? 8 k° Auckland considerably better off than when he r left bn a combined business and pleasure tour. 15 months ago, Mr C. E. Gardner arrived back by the Niagara to-day. His, success hinges on a contract he has made with the Admiralty in connection with a machine for coding secret messages and for the mercial exploitation of which a company was recently formed in England. The coding machine is the joint production of Mr Irardncr and a fellow Aucklander, Mr C. M. O’Brien, who is still in England, wither Mr Gardner expects shortly to return.

The measure of Mr Gardner’s success is a secret which he laughingly refuses to disclose. When his lellow passengers’ guess” that the journey had enriched Mr Gardner’s bank book by £20,000 was referred to him, Mr Gardner, smiled back £20,000 would not satisfy him. All the - service departments in the world have been looking for years for a device for the coding and decoding of secret messages,” said Mr Gardner. “ By yii'tue of a contract with the Admiralty they have the right to use it, but they have given -us authority to exploit it commercially, and for that purpose AutoCyphers, Ltd., was formed. When I arrived in England 1 heard that the Admiralty was looking for some such device, and Mr 0 Brien arid I got to work on it. This machine, which will' automatically code and decode messages, is now being manufactured in London “ The next development in intercomunication will, I think, be a system of transmission by wireless or by cable, so that letters, instead of taking a month to go from one side of the world to the otaer, will be delivered in the course of a .hours. That has not been possible so far because no method has until now been found for preservingthe complete secrecy of wireless or cable messages. For instance, in the East it is common knowledge that_ for £2 a month you can be supplied with & file of all cable messages, and that applies in varying degree to other'parts of the world. The autocypher kills that. It is impossible to decode the message which the machine ruuables up and then unjumbles.” When the Lusitania was sunk of! the Irish coast during the war, said Mr Gardner, the first hews of the disaster was received in England through the interception of a message sent by the commander of the German submarine to Germany., A similar incident’ occurred with the interception of a message from Berlin to the German Ambassador in Mexico, instructing him to create trouble between and the United States. The British experts who were responsible for the interception of those messages boasted that they could “ read anything,” but the same authorities declared that the new device put forward by himself and Mr O’Brien could not be read, or, more precisely, the chances were only one in 365,000,000, which are rather aiibstantial odds. The precise details and principles of the machine are, of course, a secret."

Mr Gardner is a member of the lirm of Messrs Gardner Bros and Parker, brick manufacturers. New Lynn, and he has been associated, with several other innovations mainly connected with improvements in that industry, “New Zealand patents in England are badly handled, 5 ’ he said, “with the result that the people who own them will not get anything out of them. Patents must be handled by men of experience, and New Zealand inventors would do well to check up carefully the people who offer, to handle their patents,” As a relaxation from the business side of his mission, Mr Gardner played a good deal of golf, including a game against Abe Mitchell, but, as in the case of his invention, he did not quote figures.