Power Of Genie

The Alberti Disk:

Renaissance Italy launched the careers of Leonardo Da Vince and Michelangelo, but the time and place also produced intrigues, conspiracies, and espionage. The wealthy and powerful merchant princes were under threat from dangerous and cunning rivals of their own class. Leon Battista Alberti  ( 1404-1472) was the illegitmate son of a wealthy Florentine exile in Genoa. Alberti’s accomplishments put him among the ranks of other Renaissance men. Architect, art theorist, and mathematician, Alberti is also remembered for inventing a gadget to keep secrets secret.

HOw this puzzle Works:

Have you ever used a “decoder ring”? If so, you know that letters are a witched with other letters to write or read a code message. This switch is called “substitution” by cryptographers. Alberti used 20 letters and four numbers on his disk (Alberti thought he didn’t need the letters J,U,W,H,K, and Y. ) The letters were jumbled to make the code more difficult to break. How did it work? Click to turn the small disk to match a lower-case letter with any capital letter on the big disk. Choose a letter or number from each disk that lines up and this is your “code key”. For our code we chose f=A.

Enjoy and try solving this difficult puzzle.