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Hagelin Pin-wheel C-36 → ← B-211
Pin-and-lug cipher machine
- wanted item
The C-35 is the first fully mechanical
pin-and-lug cipher machine
developed by Boris Hagelin of AB Cryptoteknik in Stockholm
(Sweden).
It is much smaller than most of his later machines
of the same class. It has five coding wheels and a revolving cage
with sideways movable bars with lugs.
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The C-35 was initially developed at the request of the French Army,
who wanted the machine to fit the pocket of their trousers, providing
Boris Hagelin with a piece of wood of the desired size, that would fit
the pocket of an army uniform.
The C-35 became the basic design on which all Hagelin's later machines
would be based. At the front right are five pin-wheels that are fitted
on a common axle. Behind it is a cylindrical cage with horizontal bars that
can be displaced to the left side. Each bar has a vertical lug at a
fixed positon. At the left is a counter and a printer.
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Each cipher wheel has a different number of steps:
25, 23, 21, 19 and 17 (all co-primes of 26) to ensure
the maximim cycle length, or period, of 3,900,225.
A plaintext message is encrypted on a letter-by letter basis, by setting the
alphabet knob at the left to the input letter and rotating the knob,
or advance lever, at the right. The output letter is then printed on
a narrow paper strip at the left. The device was an immediate hit.
Hagelin sold 5000 units to the French Army in 1935.
The image above shows one of the few
surviving examples of a C-35 from the internal collection of
Crypto AG.
It was demonstrated by former development chief
Oskar Sturzinger during a
book presentation
in Basel in 2008.
The C-35 was succeeded a year later by the improved by the
C-36.
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© Crypto Museum. Created: Wednesday 05 August 2009. Last changed: Sunday, 14 June 2020 - 07:43 CET.
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