MarkoPerko Online Daily Fact

MarkoPerko Online
Daily Fact

There is a famous manuscript that no one can read._Hard as it may seem to believe, there exits a famous manuscript that no one can read. It is an archaic, scientific text that comprises 102 vellum leaves, detached from vellum covers. The manuscript is embellished with several hundred multicolored drawings, mostly botanical and biological in nature, and is handwritten in a stylish black ink script, in an "unknown" alphabet, in cipher.
In 1912 New York rare book dealer Wilfrid Michael Voynich purchased the manuscript, believed to be medieval in origin, from the Mondragone Jesuit College in Frascati, Italy. The manuscript had many owners throughout the centuries, not the least of which was the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1522-1612), a man possessed by the world of alchemy.
Voynich, familiar with symbolism and armed with what he thought to be powerful circumstantial evidence, had posited the theory that the manuscript's author might have been the 13th century Franciscan monk, alchemist, and scientific experimenter, Roger Bacon (c. 1220-1292). With this in mind, he subsequently had copies made and offered them to anyone who thought they could decipher it. Although the groups of letters and words appeared at first to be rather rudimentary, a second look revealed otherwise. Even the pictures accompanying the text proved to yield no information. Philologists and cryptologists struggled with the manuscript, without success. Even a division of United States Military Intelligence became intrigued by the Voynich Manuscript, but its experts failed too. The manuscript refused to give up its secrets.
Of the many excited scholars who attempted to break the code, none had any success until 1921, when Professor William Romaine Newbold, a cryptologist and a specialist in medieval history and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, said he had deciphered the arcane alphabet. For two years prior, Newbold had meticulously examined the vellum leaves. By a very complicated method he had arrived at an answer, which he presented to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia in April of that year.
Newbold came to the same conclusion as Voynich had: it was written by Roger Bacon. Newbold stated that Bacon encoded the manuscript to avoid being branded as a heretic, for it contained scientific knowledge unheard of at the time. The manuscript even suggested that Bacon had invented and successfully utilized microscopes and telescopes nearly four centuries before their documented inventions.
The crowd of academicians gathered at the meeting were astonished, some thinking Newbold was really reaching. But Newbold's reputation and presentation proved very convincing: the preliminary findings demonstrated that the Voynich Manuscript had been deciphered. However, Newbold continued analyzing the manuscript up until his death in 1926.
It seems that shortly after Newbold's death much of his claims about the manuscript were proven false and relegated to the dustbin of historical sophistry. It was pure bunk and the manuscript had yet again claimed another victim. But that didn't stop the dreamers, those who fantasized about cracking the uncrackable code. Many more tried their hand, many more failed.
Upon the death of Wilfrid Voynich in 1930, his famous manuscript became the charge of his wife, Ethel Lillian. She was an independent woman in her own right, as well she could afford to be, for in 1897 she authored a book entitled The Gadfly, which before her death had sold over 2.5 million copies, making her as big a seller as Shakespeare, Dickens, and Burns. Since she had no interest in the hullabaloo surrounding the manuscript, she placed it in her safety deposit box in a New York bank and promptly forgot about it.
Ethel Lillian died in 1960, at the age of 96, leaving the manuscript in the hands of executors. The manuscript was auctioned off to the highest bidder, Hans P. Kraus, a noted New York collector of rare books. Two years later he offered it for sale at the then ungodly sum of $160,000.
Kraus advertised the book by saying that when deciphered, it might reveal a new understanding of the history of man. Needless to say, no one thought the work worthy of such a lofty figure and in 1969 he presented the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University with the Voynich Manuscript (MS 408).
So now the Voynich Manuscript reposes within the walls of academia, still refusing to give up its many secrets.