Summary of Jason Fagone's The Woman Who Smashed Codes

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Elizebeth was interviewed by the NSA in 1976, and she kept referring to the events of Riverbank Laboratories as if they were still recent. She explained that she was the last person who might remember the crags of things.
#2 Elizebeth Smith was a twenty-three-year-old woman who went to the Newberry Library in Chicago in 1916 to look for a job. She was met by George Fabyan, who invited her to come to Riverbank and spend the night with him.
#3 Elizebeth’s family had never shared her fear of being ordinary. They were midwestern people of modest means, Quakers from Huntington, Indiana. Her father, John Marion Smith, traced his lineage to an English Quaker who sailed to America in 1682 on the same boat as William Penn.
#4 Elizebeth’s father didn’t want her to go to college, but she went anyway, studying Greek and English literature at top liberal arts schools. She found the concept of aristocracy liberating: the measure of a person was her ideas, not her wealth or religious knowledge.

Sujets

• Religion
• historical

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 20 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669356110
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Jason Fagone's The Woman Who Smashed Codes
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11 Insights from Chapter 12
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Elizebeth was interviewed by the NSA in 1976, and she kept referring to the events of Riverbank Laboratories as if they were still recent. She explained that she was the last person who might remember the crags of things.

#2

Elizebeth Smith was a twenty-three-year-old woman who went to the Newberry Library in Chicago in 1916 to look for a job. She was met by George Fabyan, who invited her to come to Riverbank and spend the night with him.

#3

Elizebeth’s family had never shared her fear of being ordinary. They were midwestern people of modest means, Quakers from Huntington, Indiana. Her father, John Marion Smith, traced his lineage to an English Quaker who sailed to America in 1682 on the same boat as William Penn.

#4

Elizebeth’s father didn’t want her to go to college, but she went anyway, studying Greek and English literature at top liberal arts schools. She found the concept of aristocracy liberating: the measure of a person was her ideas, not her wealth or religious knowledge.

#5

Elizebeth was extremely bright, but she was also extremely argumentative. She was attracted to male artists, and she wrote about the importance of being honest and not glossing over offensive things.

#6

Elizebeth was a teacher in 1915, and she was still unsure of what she wanted to do with her life. She moved back in with her parents that spring, and began looking for a new job. She didn’t want to work in clerical positions.

#7

The Newberry Library in Chicago houses a rare copy of the First Folio of William Shakespeare, a book whose backstory had intrigued Elizebeth when she learned it in college. The library was created by a rich man’s will, and its trustees wrote their status anxieties upon it.

#8

The Newberry Library was a select institution for the better and cleaner classes. It was a five-story building of tan granite blocks, and all visitors had to fill out a slip stating the purpose of their research. The books were available for reference only.

#9

Elizebeth went to the Newberry Library to see the First Folio. The book was displayed under glass. It was large and dense, and it ran to nine hundred pages. The binding was made of highly polished goatskin with a large grain.

#10

Elizebeth had always wanted to work in literature or research, and she was excited when she was offered the position at the Newberry Library. She was taken aback when Fabyan asked her to spend the night with him.

#11

Elizebeth was brought to Riverbank, Fabyan’s private estate, to help with the decoding of the plays. She was told that the author of the plays was not William Shakespeare, but Francis Bacon, a pioneering scientist and philosopher-king of Elizabethan England.

#12

Fabyan and Elizebeth rode west for ninety minutes, and then the train came to a stop in front of a farmhouse called the Lodge. Elizebeth would be staying there for the night.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

The town of Geneva, Illinois, was the center of gossip about Fabyan and his strange laboratory. The grounds were private, and only open to the public during certain times. The press often referred to him as Colonel Fabyan or simply The Colonel.

#2

Before he built the laboratories, Fabyan had often appeared in the Chicago newspapers in connection with more conventional tycoon activities: donations to political figures, board meetings of the stock exchange. People thought they knew his story.

#3

Colonel Fabyan, the head of the community, was proud to explain that they were all thinkers there. They had sequestered themselves in this lush, remote location to learn how not to die. They were experimenting with genetics to improve the human race.

#4

Some experiments at Riverbank went into ethically questionable territory. For example, the founder of the Training School, where Fabyan recruited his subjects, had thought society should force the girls to be sterilized.

#5

At Riverbank, Elizebeth was shown how the human body is capable of things that we would never have guessed existed. She was shown how, with the help of $750,000 worth of radium, the bones of a woman could be illuminated.

#6

The guests arrived at the Lodge, and Elizebeth was shocked to see that Fabyan had dressed up as the ideal of a country squire. They all wore semiformal clothes with a country feel, except for a slim man in a pinstriped shirt and pants.

#7

The Villa was the center of Fabyan’s interests. It was filled with taxidermized animals, and he kept two pet grizzly bears inside. The river lay beyond, a placid silver width flowing southward.

#8

On June 7, five thousand women marched towards the Republican National Convention to demand the right to vote. The wind and rain pushed the women this way and that by the handles of their increasingly useless umbrellas. The delegates decided that an amendment would violate the right of each state to settle this question for itself.

#9

Elizebeth Smith, a young woman from Indiana, was hired to work at Fabyan’s estate in Chicago. She was taught how to dive for what Francis Bacon had left behind: a sunken treasure of words.
Insights from Chapter 3

#1

The Baconian theory is that Shakespeare was actually Francis Bacon in disguise. They lived in the same country in the same era, and Bacon was by far the more distinguished. He wrote manifestoes that heralded the dawn of the scientific age.

#2

The method that Mrs. Gallup used to find the messages was the most scientific and plausible yet. It was demonstrated by Francis Bacon in his book De Augmentis Scientarium, published the same year as Shakespeare’s First Folio, 1623.

#3

The bi-formed alphabet was the key to finding the messages. Mrs. Gallup looked for minute differences in the shapes of letterforms to discover the biformed alphabet.