SIGSALY

Yeah, yeah, sure.

So, um, the system was called SIGSALY, and it was developed in nineteen forty-one, nineteen forty-two by Bell Telephone Laboratories.

And you'll be familiar with scrambler telephone technology.

Well, that actually, some people would describe that more as a sort of privacy device rather than an encryption device.

A really skilled interceptor would actually be able to decipher conversation on a scrambler phone.

SIGSALY, uh, is actually a voice synthesizer, so it breaks down the patterns in the human voice, um, at the rate of, um, fifty instances per second.

Breaks them down, and then they would be coded, sent across the Atlantic, and then reassembled almost in real time on the other side, which given the period we're talking about, this is really remarkable technology.

So it was actually a voice synthesizer, and there's a, a great story.