A woman bought a vintage dress. It had a secret pocket with a mysterious note
An antique 1880s dress found in a Maine thrift store contained a hidden pocket with seemingly random words like “Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank,” sparking years of attempts to decode the message. Commenters explain that the note was ultimately identified as a highly compressed 1888 weather report encoded using 19th-century commercial telegraph codes, where entire complex phrases were mapped to single words to save on per-word transmission fees. The thread branches into related topics such as information entropy, historical telegraphy, the economics and error risks of dense encoding schemes, and even social history around mortality and women’s clothing.
Telegraph Code and Weather Message
- Commenters clarify that the “mysterious” note is a compressed 19th‑century weather report using a commercial telegraph code.
- Some initially hoped it was espionage or a romantic secret but accept the weather-decoding result as interesting historical context.
- A linked NOAA article is praised as a clearer, more detailed account than the news piece.
Information Density and Compression
- The note is used to illustrate information entropy: each coded word carries high information content.
- People liken the code to early data compression: mapping long, specific phrases (e.g., childbirth or medical outcomes) into single words.
- Telegraph codes are compared to modern techniques like prompt compression for LLMs and dense binary formats in aviation and telecom (e.g., ARINC, ASN.1 PER).
Telegraph Economics and Design Choices
- Telegrams were expensive and billed per word, motivating dense coding and limited vocabularies.
- Operators and pricing schemes favored recognizable words over random strings, pushing codebooks toward pseudo‑Latin words under length limits.
- There is discussion of error‑resilience: long, distinctive words reduce mis-decoding compared with short or numeric codes.
Why the Code Note in a Dress?
- Some wonder why a dress had a secret pocket and why it held an encoded forecast.
- Possible explanations: women working in clerical/weather roles; dress as “business casual” of the time; pockets being hidden by design, especially in women’s clothing.
Pockets and Gendered Clothing
- A substantial tangent explores the history and politics of women’s pockets: hidden tie‑on pockets, later reticules, and long‑running scarcity of sewn-in pockets.
- Pockets are linked to autonomy; “secret” or internal pockets may have been the only option for women.
Childbirth, Risk, and Grief
- The grim telegraph phrases about twins and maternal death spark reflection on historic child and maternal mortality.
- Long subthread debates modern vs. historical resilience to child loss, with strong disagreement over whether deep, lasting grief is “weakness” or an inevitable, human response.
Access and Meta-Discussion
- Several users report CNN blocking certain ad‑blocking or cookie‑blocking extensions and share workarounds or mirror links.