In 1976, 84-year-old Elizebeth Friedman granted a rare interview to NSA linguist Virginia Valaki about her early codebreaking career at Riverbank Laboratories. Valaki sought to understand how Elizebeth and her husband, William, became expert cryptologists between 1916 and 1920. Elizebeth recounted how it began.

In June 1916, 23-year-old Elizebeth arrived in Chicago seeking work in literature or research. Raised in a modest Quaker family in Indiana, she defied her father to attend college, where she studied poetry, philosophy, and William Shakespeare. She cultivated a fierce intellectual independence. After graduating and briefly teaching, she found small-town life stifling and moved to Chicago. After a discouraging week of job hunting, however, she decided to return home.

Before leaving, she visited the Newberry Library to see a rare First Folio of Shakespeare. A librarian mentioned that George Fabyan, a wealthy Chicago businessman, needed an assistant for research involving Shakespeare and secret ciphers. The librarian called Fabyan, who arrived immediately in a limousine. The eccentric millionaire invited Elizebeth to his estate, Riverbank, to stay the night. Despite her confusion and alarm, he swept her into his car and onto a train to Geneva, Illinois.

During the journey, Fabyan expounded on the theory that Francis Bacon secretly authored Shakespeare’s plays and concealed messages in them using an ingenious cipher. Scholar Elizabeth Wells Gallup had already decoded these messages at Riverbank but needed a sharp-eyed assistant to bolster her research. When Fabyan brusquely demanded to know what Elizebeth could do, she coolly replied that he would have to find out. They arrived at his 350-acre estate, where Elizebeth would stay at a building called the Lodge.

Riverbank Laboratories attracted wild rumors in nearby Geneva, including stories of “a naked woman” (21), bizarre experiments, and a plethora of military secrets. Fabyan, a textile magnate who inherited millions, built this private research compound to pursue scientific immortality. Visitors described it as a wonderland where gifted scientists conducted cutting-edge investigations in acoustics, genetics, and other fields. Fabyan insisted that he was funding pure research for humanity’s benefit, though his methods raised ethical concerns. One experiment recruited subjects from a local juvenile prison for posture studies and required them to undress, fueling gossip. He also maintained a collection of human skeletons and conducted questionable anatomical research.

On her first evening, Elizebeth dined at the Lodge with Elizabeth Wells Gallup, an elegant scholar who led the cipher research; her sister, Kate Wells; and several scientists, including J. A. Powell, a University of Chicago publicist; Bert Eisenhour, Riverbank’s chief engineer; and William Friedman, a shy, well-dressed geneticist who managed the greenhouse and bred experimental crops.

The next day, Elizebeth toured the estate. She saw laboratories under construction, a mansion designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, a Japanese garden with two caged grizzly bears, a working Dutch windmill, and other eccentric features. The scale and strangeness overwhelmed her.

Gallup then explained the work. Francis Bacon invented a cipher, she claimed, using two slightly different typefaces to hide messages in printed books. Gallup had already extracted these secrets from copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio but needed Elizebeth to validate her findings and extend the research. Despite misgivings, Elizebeth returned to Chicago to consider the offer. Ultimately, drawn by the opportunity’s uniqueness, she accepted the job.

Gallup administered a deciphering test. She gave Elizebeth a worksheet of text from the First Folio, a photo enlargement of the original page, a magnifying glass, and charts showing supposedly distinct letterforms that Bacon had planted. Using Bacon’s documented biliteral cipher—where two subtly different type styles hide a code—Elizebeth had to identify each letter as an a-form or b-form and then decode the secret message. The work proved extraordinarily difficult. Letters looked nearly identical. After eight hours, Elizebeth produced an answer only with Gallup’s repeated guidance.

Over following weeks, Elizebeth struggled with additional tests, always requiring Gallup’s intervention to succeed. She began to have doubts. The Baconian theory enjoyed broad support—Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, had voiced support—and Gallup’s scientific-seeming method impressed many. Fabyan promoted the work zealously, inviting skeptical academics to Riverbank and pressuring Elizebeth to persuade them. Privately, however, Elizebeth found the critics’ arguments compelling. The supposedly hidden messages were poorly written, unlike Shakespeare’s brilliant plays. Variations between different Folio copies exceeded the tiny differences that Gallup claimed to see. The method seemed to rely on unconscious bias rather than objective analysis.

Elizebeth grew close to William Friedman, who photographed Folio pages for Gallup while managing genetics experiments in his windmill laboratory. They bicycled together, shared meals, and gradually confided their shared heresy: The Bacon messages were not real. They agreed that Gallup had deceived herself and was seeing patterns that she unconsciously wished to find. Challenging her would be dangerous, however, as Fabyan controlled their livelihoods and had already demonstrated authoritarian tendencies. The young researchers felt trapped, uncertain of how to escape without destroying their careers.

In early 1917, Elizebeth returned home as her mother, Sopha, died from cancer. She exchanged emotional letters with William, calling him “Billy Boy” and signing hers “Elsbeth.” Meanwhile, the Zimmermann Telegram—Germany’s proposal for a military alliance with Mexico, intercepted and decoded by the British—pushed the US toward war and revealed a critical issue: The US had virtually no codebreaking capability. The FBI, NSA, and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) did not yet exist, and the War Department’s intelligence division employed only 17 officers.

Fabyan offered Riverbank’s services to the government. In April, Army Colonel Joseph Mauborgne inspected the estate and recommended using it as the government’s primary codebreaking center. Encrypted messages began arriving by mail. Fabyan hired support staff and established a Department of Ciphers, putting Elizebeth and William in charge despite their inexperience with modern military codes.

The couple were made to learn cryptanalysis from scratch. They studied frequency patterns, built analytical tools like frequency tables, and developed systematic approaches to breaking unfamiliar systems. Working side by side, they solved messages intercepted from Mexican forces, “Hindu revolutionaries,” and other sources, inventing techniques as they went. When Scotland Yard brought a trunkful of coded letters from a German-backed separatist plot in India, they reconstructed codebooks through pattern analysis and broke the conspiracy wide open.

During their time at Riverbank, operating as the only American codebreaking team, Elizebeth and William produced eight scientific pamphlets between 1917 and 1920 known as the Riverbank Publications. These papers laid the foundation for modern cryptology, introducing rigorous methods and new concepts like cryptanalysis. Though William’s name appeared on most covers, Elizebeth collaborated extensively. Their partnership proved more effective than individual efforts, and they later wrote that two minds working together could achieve a “concentration of effort” not possible for one person alone (76).

Elizebeth and William developed romantic feelings but approached marriage cautiously. There were obstacles in their way: religious differences (she was Quaker, while he was Jewish), family disapproval, and financial insecurity under Fabyan’s erratic employ. Yet their partnership grew essential. In May 1917, they eloped to Chicago, where a rabbi performed the ceremony. William’s mother collapsed upon learning that her son had married a gentile. Elizebeth moved into William’s cramped windmill quarters at Riverbank.

As the US mobilized, Fabyan hosted Army recruitment rallies and opened a cryptology training school at Riverbank. Elizebeth and William taught 80 young officers bound for France, lecturing on cipher methods using actual wartime intercepts. The work proved successful, but Fabyan’s controlling behavior intensified. He intercepted their mail, bugged the classrooms, and blocked job offers from DC. William discovered this surveillance when contacts reported that their letters had gone unanswered.

In May 1918, William finally escaped to serve as an Army cryptologist in France and was assigned to General Headquarters in Chaumont. Elizebeth, barred from overseas service because she was a woman, remained at Riverbank breaking codes. William’s letters revealed his loneliness and insecurity. Elizebeth, meanwhile, hinted that Fabyan had made unwelcome sexual advances during William’s absence, though she was never specific about what happened.

When the war ended in November 1918, the couple planned their permanent escape. The Army kept William in France for months writing technical histories. Upon his return in April 1919, they explored corporate opportunities, but Fabyan’s agents followed them and sabotaged job prospects. Cornered, they returned to Riverbank, where Fabyan broke promises of raises and continued to interfere in job offers, determined to keep them at Riverbank. Most egregiously, he denied William credit for his groundbreaking paper on the cryptographic statistic called the “index of coincidence.”

In December 1920, Army cryptologist Joseph Mauborgne offered both Friedmans positions in DC. Fearing Fabyan’s retaliation, they planned in secret. They packed everything into a borrowed car, drove to the estate to confront Fabyan, and announced that they were leaving. To their surprise, he calmly wished them well. As they departed for the capital, William predicted that Riverbank would fade into a dark memory, while Elizebeth looked forward to a more independent form of work and the opportunity to step out of her husband’s shadow.