The National Museum of Computing
Wednesday, 22nd October 2025 from 7.00 to 8.30 pm
Between 1850 and 1855, the London-based newspaper The Times published over 50 encrypted advertisements apparently intended for the same recipient. As we know today, the ads in that series were meant for the sea captain Richard Collinson, who at the time was on a mission in the Canadian Arctic trying to solve the mystery of the lost John Franklin expedition.
The lecturers at this online talk (Elonka Dunin, Taylor Leach and Klaus Schmeh) are members of a project aiming to decrypt all of Collinson’s ads and to place them in their geographic and cultural context.