Janelle Cipher Wheel | Build Your Own Escape Room

2,560,000 possible wheel settings. So powerful and secure - yet so easy to both encode and decode messages. 5.9” diameter. Made from Maple and alder with MDF cores for stability and strength. Bottom wheel is ¼” thick, remaining wheels are .143” inch thick. All text is deeply laser engraved and should last a lifetime and more.
We have made historical encryption devices for many years as well as six of our own designs. I began thinking about what would be the best possible non-computer based cipher. Goals were ease of use, very highly secure, and uses letters and numbers as well four important keyboard symbols for the modern age ( @ # . / )
Putting our knowledge and experience together, we developed this hand held cipher for the modern age, the Janelle Cipher.
To begin, set the wheels to a predetermined arrangement. As an example, perhaps line the 5 wheels such that A - 122 - 99 - 62 - 10 are all in the same column. This sets the wheels for the Encoding or decoding process. Without turning the wheels, go to the first letter in your message.
If the message was “ SEND HELP TO 738 MAIN ST.” then you would find “S” on the out wheel and then pick any one of the 4 numbers in the S column (143, 120, 43, or 31 in this scenario). Then go to the next letter in the message “E”. Pick any number in that column, as so forth. Since E comes up again later in the message, you would likely chose one of the other numbers in the column next time you encoded E. In this message no letter is repeated more than 4 times, so every number in the encrypted message would be different. VERY hard to decode! And next to impossible without knowing the cipher. Even if you had the cipher but didn’t know the initial key, there are 2.5+ different possible scenarios.
Note that in long messages, the key could be changed at predetermined times, perhaps every 30th character.
Comes with full instructions and a worksheet to help you in the encoding and decoding process.

Made in Hudson, FL Copyright 2020 Creative Crafthouse. Design by Dave Janelle