"Every letter was cut out with a jigsaw, and it took two and a half years of cutting to do it," recalls James Sanborn, the creator of the CIA's Sculpture "Kryptos." In a 2005 visit to Washington DC, a select group of Kryptos enthusiasts met with Sanborn and Ed Scheidt to cross-examine some of the more obscure details of Sanborn's works. It was then that the designer of the sculpture elaborated on the origins of the font that comprises a majority of the Kryptos puzzle. A stencil form of the Times Roman Font, the exact name eluded the sculptor, was purchased as pre-cut letter templates made out of metal. The copper plates were spray-painted black, and the characters were positioned by hand and scribed. Using only a Bosch power jigsaw with a file attachment and a drill, Sanborn began cutting through the half-inch copper plates. Seven days a week for two and a half years, some nine hundred fifty blades, twelve jigsaws, and ten assistants later, quietly and behind-the-scenes, the now famous copper ribbon had been completed.
Dr. James Gillogly, former president of the American Cryptogram Association, is one of two non-agency individuals known to have obtained personal Kryptos photographs. Gillogly's independent solution of the first three Kryptos passages (known by insiders as k1, k2, k3) in 1999 earned him a photo shoot with the sculpture at CIA Headquarters. Eighteen of his Kryptos images and four other photos became the foundation for replicating the copperplate's code, a virtually invisible message quite literally encoded as air.
By late 2004, a kerning cipher theory emerged as the motivation for undertaking such an enormous task, which could have proven to be nothing more than an overly-ambitious waste of time. Taken as a clue directly from the first decrypted passage of Kryptos, "Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion," the phrase seemed to suggest that the physical positioning of the letters on the large copper ribbon may carry its own elusive message.
A process that took nearly four months to complete resulted in two image files of the actual copperplate grid layout as made popular by Gary Phillips' Kryptos site Realm of Twelve. Not only was the font meticulously traced from hundreds of variations of Gillogly's photos, every individual letter from the sculpture was carefully aligned to the photographs and verified. Since then, thousands of the Kryptos Sculpture Copperplate transparencies have been downloaded and used in publications around the world.
Five years came and went. The dance between light and shadow wasn't any more revealing than before the development of the replica. The idea of a kerning cipher faded into the vast sea of inexperience that permeates all Kryptos neophytes. What happens out in that courtyard -- or what will happen -- remains a secret, at least until the masked passages of text come to light. Time played an important role in the approaches to the sculpture to those of us who stayed with it as a hobby and personal adventure. One of those things was the realization that deliberate training was required to understand Kryptos and that most of the sculpture's clues had gone unnoticed. Meanings and methods changed, from the Morse Code to the transposition cipher of k3 and beyond. The puzzle became more elegant to the keen observer, and the desire to teach what had been learned became the central goal for some.
"I wanted to create something that could be understood by anybody. I had done the hard work -- the research, and I wanted to demonstrate the genius of Sanborn's work in a way that most people were not already aware," Gary Phillips explains. It isn't that Kryptos couldn't speak for itself, but presenting classical cryptography through layman's animated examples seemed to bridge the gap of where to begin and the intoxicating lure of unsolved codes. To portray the decryption of Kryptos visually, the actual Kryptos font was needed, and the old replicas from Realm of Twelve were no longer good enough.
On a technical note, the copperplate replicas did not contain text that could be modified. They were a snapshot of the precise layout of the Kryptos lettering as it appears in the sculpture. For print publications and cipher experimentation, this distinction is night and day. The Kryptos Font needed to be produced dynamically by typing text into a word processor or graphics editor directly from the keyboard. Not only would this produce wording as identifiably "Kryptos," it would help hobbyists to easily draw a parallel between cipher text and the plain text it represents. A Kryptos Font would also fulfill the demands to print Kryptos solutions in professional media publications as Jim Sanborn's masterpiece continues to grow in popularity.
Elonka Dunin, the other of the two civilians with personal Kryptos photos, had the foresight to obtain large pencil rubbings of the Kryptos Font during her visit to the CIA courtyard. With an arrangement of about six characters to a standard 8.5-by-11-inch sheet of paper, the life-size details required to produce the Kryptos Font were available. In the spring of 2009, reusing the previous Kryptos Font Extraction, and continuing night and day for two months, an authentic Kryptos Font Family was born.
The process the second time around was less cumbersome, because much of the work had already been done in the first version of the font. Ten of the characters not available in the rubbings were converted to vectors from the old replica after re-mastering them and checking them against known photos. The remaining characters,
A, B, D, G, H, K, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, W, Y, and ? were slowly traced from the rubbings and again compared against the original replica and Kryptos photographs. The vectors, or font outlines, were imported to typography software for final adjustments and rendering to their final scalable forms. It may be worth noting that in the physical sculpture, no two characters are absolutely identical. Although cut from templates, they were all produced by hand. The only perfect Kryptos Font will forever remain on the world renown verdigris copper ribbon.
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The copper plates were spray-painted black, and the characters were positioned by hand and scribed. Using only a Bosch power jigsaw with a file attachment and a drill, Sanborn began cutting through the half-inch copper plates. Seven days a week for two and a half years, some nine hundred fifty blades, twelve jigsaws, and ten assistants later, quietly and behind-the-scenes, the now famous copper ribbon had been completed.
Elonka Dunin
