the woman who smashed codes by jason fagone

Much like Margot Lee Shetterly’s “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race” or “The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II” by Denise Kiernan, Fagone sheds light on a too-long-overlooked story of a remarkable woman and her accomplishments. In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagone chronicles the life of this extraordinary woman, who played an integral role in our nations history for 40 years. His research is exhaustive and his storytelling, spellbinding. Their work quickly expanded when they learned they had unprecedented and unmatched codebreaking skills.įagone chronicles the couple’s lives and accomplishments against the backdrop of the birth and growth of the modern intelligence community. Initially, they were assigned to seeking encoded messages that Francis Bacon supposedly embedded in the works of William Shakespeare. It was 1916.ĭuring her four years at Riverbank, Smith met and married William Friedman. Stunned and confused, yet intrigued, Smith agreed. In The Woman Who Smashed Codes,Fagone chronicles the life of this woman, who played an integral role in our nations history for forty years. “Will you come to Riverbank and spend the night with me,” he asked upon first meeting her. There, scientists, inventors and intellectuals holed up to study and learn, experiment and discover - all funded by Fabyan’s inherited fortune.įabyan hired Smith as his assistant. Through happenstance, she met George Fabyan, a wealthy and eccentric businessman who owned a compound named Riverbank. When she was 23, she railed against a presumed lifetime of teaching, followed by marriage and children and headed to Chicago.

Elizebeth Smith, a Quaker girl from a small town in Indiana, first fought against societal norms by earning a college degree against her father’s will.

The woman who smashed codes by jason fagone