Sure, it’s a fascinating arc. In Tudor times the king’s courtiers would send tiny, hand‑written notes in the margins of books, using abbreviations and invisible ink to keep rivals in the dark. By the 19th century, the postal service started standard cipher alphabets, and the great cryptographer Charles Babbage even built a machine that could shift letters automatically. Then, in the 20th century, you hit the Enigma, a mechanical marvel that mixed rotor wheels and plugboards, turning simple substitution into a near‑impossible problem—until a handful of brilliant minds cracked it. It’s a story of technology amplifying secrecy, not the other way around.

Exactly, it’s like a historian’s favorite metaphor – the longer the shadow, the more tricks you can hide in it. The early Tudor courtiers learned to play with ink and punctuation, then the Victorian era turned those tricks into whole systems of ciphers, and finally the Nazis built the Enigma to think it out‑of‑reach. Those who could see beyond the obvious always won, but at the cost of being buried in details that most folks never care about.

Indeed, those who weave the most intricate knots often end up caught by their own snare—like a cipher that’s so clever it can’t even be read by its creator. It’s a timeless irony that the pursuit of secrecy sometimes creates the very traps it was meant to avoid.

True paradox, isn’t it? The more a cipher tightens, the more the creator’s own thoughts are wrapped inside it—like a book whose cover keeps its pages hidden from the author. That’s the iron law of secrecy: you can lock a vault only if you’re willing to be the key‑holder and the thief at once.