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Speaker 1: This Day in History Class. It's a production of I

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Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hello, Welcome to this Day in History Class,

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Speaker 1: where we dust off a little piece of history every day.

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Speaker 1: Today is July. The day was July nine. Agnes Meyer

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Speaker 1: Driscoll was born in Genesio, Illinois. Driscoll, a cryptanalyst who

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Speaker 1: broke code during World War Two, is known as the

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Speaker 1: first Lady of Naval Cryptology. From nineteen o seven to

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Speaker 1: nineteen o nine, Agnes attended Otterband College in Columbus, Ohio,

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Speaker 1: but she transferred to Ohio State University, where she studied math, physics, music,

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Speaker 1: and foreign languages. She graduated in nineteen eleven with Bachelor

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Speaker 1: of Arts degrees in math and physics. Agnes was proficient

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Speaker 1: in English, French, German, in Latin, and Japanese. Once she graduated,

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Speaker 1: she moved to Amarillo, Texas, where she worked as the

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Speaker 1: director of music at the Lowry Phillips Military Academy. She

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Speaker 1: was also the head of the math and music departments

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Speaker 1: at two high schools while she was in Armorillo. In

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Speaker 1: nineteen eighteen, one year after the US declared war on Germany,

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Speaker 1: Agnes enlisted in the U. S. Navy and was given

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Speaker 1: the rank of chief Yeoman. She was assigned to the

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Speaker 1: Postal and Cable Censorship Office in Washington, d C. Then

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Speaker 1: transferred to the Code in Signal Section of the Director

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Speaker 1: of Naval Communications, where she remained throughout World War One.

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Speaker 1: The section was responsible for protecting naval communications by encoding

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Speaker 1: America's messages. Agnes got her start developing codes here. She

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Speaker 1: even co developed one of the Navy's cipher machines, the

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Speaker 1: Communications Machine or c M. Once the First World War ended,

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Speaker 1: Agnes stayed with the Code in Signal Section as a civilian.

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Speaker 1: In nineteen she worked in the department of Cipher's at

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Speaker 1: Riverbank Laboratories in Illinois, which hosted a team of people

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Speaker 1: who deciphered code. She also solved a supposedly unbreakable cipher

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Speaker 1: that was advertised by rotor machine inventor Edward Heaven in

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Speaker 1: a magazine. Heaven hired her to the Heathern Electric Code

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Speaker 1: Company to help develop an improved rotor driven cipher device

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Speaker 1: for the Navy, but his company ended up failing. Agnes

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Speaker 1: also worked in New York at Herbert O. Yard Least

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Speaker 1: Cipher Bureau, an agency that broke diplomatic codes. In she

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Speaker 1: married a lawyer named Michael Driscoll. That same year, she

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Speaker 1: joined the Navy's Cryptographic Research Desk later renamed O P

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Speaker 1: twenty G. As a crypt analyst under Lawrence Stafford, Agnes

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Speaker 1: broke codes from the Japanese Navy's main operational code book,

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Speaker 1: nicknamed the Red Book. She figured out that the Japanese

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Speaker 1: were encoding their messages using a method called columnar transposition.

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Speaker 1: She also broke the Japanese Blue Book, which also contained

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Speaker 1: super encipherments, or a method that contains code and cipher.

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Speaker 1: In cryptography, a code takes a whole word or phrase

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Speaker 1: and replaces it with another word, series of letters, or

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Speaker 1: string of numbers, while a cipher takes a single letter

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Speaker 1: or number and replaces it with another single letter or number.

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Speaker 1: As the Japanese continued to come up with new coding systems,

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Speaker 1: Driscoll successfully cracks them and helped the Navy get insight

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Speaker 1: on Japanese fuel supplies, ship accidents, naval maneuvers, and other

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Speaker 1: secret critical Japanese naval communications. She solved the cipher component

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Speaker 1: of the Japanese Fleet's operational code J and a FEAT

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Speaker 1: that helped provide warning of Japan's attack on Midway Island.

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Speaker 1: The U. S Navy was able to fully exploit the

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Speaker 1: code after the attack on Pearl Harbor and for the

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Speaker 1: rest of the Pacific War. Though she was assigned to

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Speaker 1: the task of breaking Germany's naval codes, specifically working on

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Speaker 1: the Enigma device, her team was not able to solve

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Speaker 1: the problem. Over the years, Driscoll also mentored other naval

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Speaker 1: cryptologists and intelligence officers, including Thomas Dyer and Edwin Leyden.

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Speaker 1: She got in a car accident in nineteen thirty seven

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Speaker 1: in which she sustained injuries that she never fully recovered from.

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Speaker 1: Driscoll was a principal cryptanalysts for the Navy until the

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Speaker 1: end of nineteen fifty After that, she worked for the

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Speaker 1: Armed Forces Security Agency, later to become the National Security Agency.

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Speaker 1: She retired from active federal service in nineteen fifty nine.

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Speaker 1: She died in nineteen seventy one and was buried in

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Speaker 1: Arlington National Cemetery. I'm Eve jeffco and hopefully you know

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Speaker 1: a little more about history today than you did yesterday.

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Speaker 1: If you have any burning questions or comments to tell us,

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Speaker 1: you can find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at

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Speaker 1: t d i HC podcast. Thanks again for listening, and

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Speaker 1: I hope you come back tomorrow for more delicious morsels

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