The Composer's Secret Squiggles

On July 14, 1897, the famous British composer Edward Elgar sent a letter from Great Malvern, England, to his young friend Dora Penny. Elgar affectionately called her "Dorabella," and his note contained zero regular words. Instead, it was written using 87 bizarre, looping squiggles.

The cipher uses an alphabet of 24 different symbols. Each character is made of one, two, or three semicircles—looking a bit like the letter C—pointing up, down, left, right, or diagonally. It looks exactly like a substitution cipher, where each compass-pointing curve secretly stands for a letter.

For over a century, codebreakers have tried to crack it by swapping the most common squiggles for common English letters, but they only ever get total gibberish like "BLTACEIARWUN...". Because the cipher is only 87 characters long, it is mathematically too short to prove any single word translation is correct.

The coolest clue? Years earlier, Elgar scribbled these exact same semicircles next to sheet music by Franz Liszt, perfectly matching the number of printed musical notes. The Dorabella cipher might not be a written message at all, but a private, uncrackable melody meant just for a friend.