The foregoing cases by no means exhaust the possibilities of the substitution cipher but they cover practically all methods which are satisfactory for military purposes, having in mind conservation of time, the minimizing of mental strain, and the requirements that complicated apparatus and rules be avoided, and that the resulting cipher should be adapted to telegraphic correspondence.

A message may be re-enciphered two or more times using a different key word each time or it may be enciphered by one method and re-enciphered by another method, using the same or a different key word. Complicated cipher systems requiring the memorizing of, or reference to, numerous rules have been devised for special purposes. Such systems usually fail utterly if there are any errors in transmission and it will be seen later that such errors are very common.

There are several ingenious cipher machines by which complicated ciphers can be formed, but if the apparatus is available and fairly long messages are at hand for examination, it is usually possible to solve them. Such machines are not, as a rule, simple and small enough for field use; and it must always be remembered that a machine cipher operates on certain mechanical cycles, which can be determined if the machine is available.

A book by Commandant Bazeries, entitled “Etude sur la Cryptographie Militaire,” and a series of articles by A. Collon, entitled “Etude sur la Cryptographie,” which appeared in the Revue de L’ArmÉe Belge, 1899–1902, give illustrations and details of operation of several of these cipher machines and the latter goes into the methods of deciphering messages enciphered with them. These methods of analysis require long messages, and as each one is adapted only to the product of a certain machine or apparatus, it is not considered advisable to include a discussion of them here. Those interested in such advanced cipher work must refer to these and other European authors on the subject.

The requirement that cipher messages should be adapted to telegraphic transmission, practically excludes ciphers in which three or more letters or whole words are substituted for each letter of the plain text. Such ciphers might be used for the transmission of very short messages but in no other case.

The cipher of Case 7, with a key word or phrase longer than one-fourth of the message, the cipher after the method of Case 7, using a certain page of a book as a key, and the cipher with a running key, where each letter of the cipher is the key for enciphering the next letter, all look safe and desirable, theoretically, but, practically, the work of enciphering and deciphering is hopelessly slow, and errors in enciphering or transmission make deciphering very difficult. Incidentally the first and second of these ciphers can be solved by the special solution for Case 7, and the third can be solved by trying each of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet as the first key letter, and then continuing the work for five or six letters of the cipher. When the proper primary key letter is found, the solution of the next five or six letters of the cipher will make sense, and thereafter the cipher offers no difficulty.

There are numerous other methods of preparing what is virtually a very long, or even an indefinitely long key from a short key word, but all such cipher methods have the same practical disadvantages of slowness of operation and difficulty in deciphering, if errors of enciphering or transmission have been made.

The ciphers of Napoleon were long series of numbers representing letters, syllables and words. They were really codes; and a code based on these principles, but using letters instead of numerals, might be evolved very easily. The War Department Code, the Western Union Code, and, in fact, all codes are nothing but specialized substitution ciphers in which each code word represents a letter, word or phrase of the plain text.