John Browning

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Browning

John Browning
John Mose Browning The 1911, 100 years old

Source More Images of different styles at Little Gun Info

John Moses Browning (January 23, 1855^[1] – November 26, 1926), born in Ogden, Utah, was an American firearms designer who developed many varieties of military and civilian firearms, cartridges, and gun mechanisms, many of which are still in use around the world. He is arguably the most important figure in the development of modern automatic and semi-automatic firearms and is credited with 128 gun patents.^[2] He made his first firearm at age 13 in his father’s gun shop, and was awarded his first patent on October 7, 1879 at the age of 24.^[3]

Browning influenced nearly all categories of firearms design. He invented or made significant improvements to single-shot, lever-action, and slide-action, rifles and shotguns. His most significant contributions were arguably in the area of autoloading firearms. He developed the first autoloading pistols that were both reliable and compact by inventing the telescoping bolt, integrating the bolt and barrel shroud into what is known as the pistol slide. Browning’s telescoping bolt design is now found on nearly every modern semi-automatic pistol, as well as several modern fully automatic weapons. He also developed the first gas-operated machine gun, the Colt-Browning Model 1895—a system that surpassed mechanical recoil operation to become the standard for most high-power self-loading firearm designs worldwide. Browning would also make significant contributions to automatic cannon development.

Browning’s most successful designs include the M1911 pistol, the Browning Hi Power pistol, the Browning .50 caliber machine gun, the Browning Automatic Rifle, and the Browning Auto-5, a ground-breaking semi-automatic shotgun. These arms are nearly identical today to those assembled by Browning, with only minor changes in detail and cosmetics. Even today, John Browning’s guns are still some of the most copied guns in the world.

John M. Browning and Winchester Repeating Arms Company

Production examples of the Model 1885 Single Shot Rifle caught the attention of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, who dispatched a representative to evaluate the competition. Winchester bought the design for eight thousand dollars and moved production to their Connecticut factory. From 1883, Browning worked in partnership with Winchester and designed a series of rifles and shotguns, most notably the Winchester Model 1887 and Model 1897 shotguns, the falling block single shot Model 1885, and the lever-action Model 1886, Model 1892, Model 1894 and Model 1895 rifles, most of which are still in production today in some form; over seven million Model 1894s have been produced, more than any other centerfire sporting rifle.^[4]

Winchester manufactured several popular small arms designed by John M. Browning. For decades in the late 19th Century-early 20th Century, Browning designs and Winchester firearms were synonymous and the collaboration was highly successful. This came to an end when Browning proposed a new semi-automatic shotgun design, a prototype finished in 1898, to Winchester management, which ultimately became the Browning Auto-5 shotgun. As was the custom of the time, Browning’s earlier designs had been licensed exclusively to Winchester (and other manufacturers) for a single fee payment. With this new product, Browning introduced in his negotiations a continuous royalty fee based upon unit sales, rather than a single front-end fee payment. If the new shotgun became highly successful, Browning stood to make substantially more fee income over the prior license fee arrangements. Winchester management was displeased with the bold change in their relationship, and rejected Browning’s offer. Remington Arms was also approached, however the president of Remington died of a heart attack as Browning waited to offer them the gun. This forced Browning to look overseas to produce the shotgun.

Having recently successfully negotiated firearm licenses with Fabrique Nationale de Herstal of Belgium (FN), Browning took the new shotgun design to FN; the offer was accepted and FN manufactured the new shotgun, honoring its inventor, as the Browning Auto-5. The Browning Auto-5 was continuously manufactured as a highly popular shotgun throughout the 20th century. In response, Winchester shifted reliance on John Browning designs when it adopted a hammerless shotgun design of Thomas Crossley Johnson for the new Winchester Model 12, which was based upon design features of the earlier Browning-designed Winchester Model 1897 shotgun. This shift marked the end of an era of Winchester-Browning collaboration.

Shiloh National Military Park

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Shiloh National Military Park preserves the American Civil War Shiloh and Corinth battlefields. The main section of the park is in the unincorporated town of Shiloh, about nine miles (14 km) south of Savannah, Tennessee, with an additional area located in the city of Corinth, Mississippi, 23 miles (37 km) southwest of Shiloh. The Battle of Shiloh began a six-month struggle for the key railroad junction at Corinth. Afterward, Union forces marched from Pittsburg Landing to take Corinth in a May siege, then withstood an October Confederate counter-attack.

Shiloh battlefield

The Battle of Shiloh was one of the first major battles in the Western Theater of the American Civil War. The two-day battle, April 6 and April 7, 1862, involved about 65,000 Union troops under Ulysses S. Grant and Don Carlos Buell and 44,000 Confederates under Albert Sidney Johnston (killed in the battle) and P.G.T. Beauregard. The battle resulted in nearly 24,000 killed, wounded, and missing. The two days of fighting did not end in a decisive tactical victory for either side —the Union held the battlefield but failed to pursue the withdrawing Confederate forces. However, it was a decisive strategic defeat for the Confederate forces that had massed to oppose Grant’s and Buell’s invasion through Tennessee. The battlefield is named after Shiloh Methodist Church, a small log church near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee.

Other Source:

Established in 1894 to preserve the scene of the first major battle in the Western theater of the Civil War, Shiloh is considered one of the best preserved battlefields in the Nation. Besides preserving the site of the bloody April 1862 battle in Tennessee, the park commemorates the subsequent siege, battle, and occupation of the key railroad junction at nearby Corinth, Mississippi.

Lincoln Memorial

The Lincoln Memorial is an American national monument built to honor the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. It is located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. across from the Washington Monument. The architect was Henry Bacon, the sculptor of the primary statue – Abraham Lincoln, 1920 – was Daniel Chester French, and the painter of the interior murals was Jules Guerin. It is one of several monuments built to honor an American president.

The building is in the form of a Greek Doric temple and contains a large seated sculpture of Abraham Lincoln and inscriptions of two well-known speeches by Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural Address. The memorial has been the site of many famous speeches, including Martin Luther King‘s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered on August 28, 1963 during the rally at the end of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Like other monuments on the National Mall – including the nearby Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Korean War Veterans Memorial, and National World War II Memorial – the memorial is administered by the National Park Service under its National Mall and Memorial Parks group. It has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since October 15, 1966. It is open to the public 24 hours a day. In 2007, it was ranked seventh on the List of America’s Favorite Architecture by the American Institute of Architects.

Description	English: The Lincoln Memorial is a United States Presidential memorial built to honor the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. It is located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The building is in the form of a Greek Doric temple and contains a large seated sculpture of Abraham Lincoln and inscriptions of two well-known speeches by Lincoln. Nederlands: Het Lincolnmonument is een presidentieel memoriaal om de zestiende president van de VS, Abraham Lincoln, te eren. Het is gelegen aan het uiteinde van de National Mall in Washington DC. Het gebouw heeft de vorm van een Griekse Dorische tempel, binnenin staat het monumentale beeld van een zittende Abraham Lincoln en inscripties met twee van zijn bekendste speeches (inauguratie en Gettysburg address)
Date	July 2007
Source	Own work
Author	Ad Meskens

Benjamin Franklin National Memorial

The Benjamin Franklin National Memorial, located in the rotunda of The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, features a colossal statue of seated Benjamin Franklin. The 20-foot (6.1 m)-tall memorial, sculpted by James Earle Fraser between 1906 and 1911, honors the writer, inventor and American statesman. With a weight of 30 short tons (27 t), the statue stands on a 92-short-ton (83 t) pedestal of white Seravezza marble.^[2] The statue is the focal piece of the memorial hall, designed by John T. Windrim after the Pantheon, dedicated in 1938.

Kryptos Encrypted Sculpture on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

 

Kryptos Encrypted Sculpture on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

Kryptos is an encrypted sculpture by American artist Jim Sanborn located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia. Since its dedication on November 3, 1990, there has been much speculation about the meaning of the encrypted messages it bears. Of the four messages, three have been solved, with the fourth remaining one of the most famous unsolved codes in the world. The sculpture continues to provide a diversion for cryptanalysts, both amateur and professional, who are attempting to decrypt the final section. Read More Wikipedia

Title: Covert Obsolescence: The Code Room, 1993
Location: Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, DC
Materials: Copper, text, projected light and petrified tree
Size: 18’x20’x50′

Artist: Jim Sanborn Official Website

Jim Sanborn’s cryptographic sculptures, pieces on atomic energy, and large-scale projections might already seem familiar. Installed in front of the CIA headquarters, the ciphers in his sculpture Kryptos have puzzled many a code-cracker (three out of four of the coded sections have been solved), and he has been the subject of several museum shows. The artist answered a few questions we had on his work via email: Read at Rhizome

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kryptos Encrypted Sculpture on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

Kryptos is an encrypted sculpture by American artist Jim Sanborn located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia. Since its dedication on November 3, 1990, there has been much speculation about the meaning of the encrypted messages it bears. Of the four messages, three have been solved, with the fourth remaining one of the most famous unsolved codes in the world. The sculpture continues to provide a diversion for cryptanalysts, both amateur and professional, who are attempting to decrypt the final section.

Description

The main sculpture is located in the northwest corner of the New Headquarters Building courtyard, outside of the Agency cafeteria. The sculpture comprises four large copper plates with other elements made of red and green granite, white quartz, and petrified wood.

The name Kryptos comes from the Greek word for “hidden”, and the theme of the sculpture is “intelligence gathering.” The most prominent feature is a large vertical S-shaped copper screen resembling a scroll, or piece of paper emerging from a computer printer, covered with characters constituting encrypted text. The characters consist of the 26 letters of the standard Latin alphabet and question marks cut out of the copper. The main sculpture contains four separate enigmatic messages, three of which have been solved.^[1]

At the same time as the main sculpture was installed, sculptor Jim Sanborn also placed several other pieces around CIA grounds, such as several large granite slabs with sandwiched copper sheets outside the entrance to the New Headquarters Building. Several morse code messages are engraved in the copper, and one of the slabs has an engraved compass rose and a lodestone. Other elements of Sanborn’s installation include a landscaped area, a duck pond, a reflecting pool, and several other seemingly unmarked slabs.

The cost of the sculpture was $250,000.^[2]

Encrypted messages

The ciphertext on one half of the main sculpture contains 869 characters in total—865 letters and 4 question marks. In April 2006, however, Sanborn released information stating that a letter was omitted on the main half of Kryptos “for aesthetic reasons, to keep the sculpture visually balanced.”^[3] There are also a few incorrect letters in the ciphertext which Sanborn has said were intentional, and a few letters near the beginning of the bottom half have have been displaced from their normal positions, apparently intentionally. The other half of the sculpture comprises a keyed Vigenère encryption tableau, consisting of 867 letters. One of the lines of the tableau is one character too long, which Sanborn has indicated was accidental.

Kryptos Part 1                                          Kryptos Part 2  

EMUFPHZLRFAXYUSDJKZLDKRNSHGNFIVJ    ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCD

YQTQUXQBQVYUVLLTREVJYQTMKYRDMFD    AKRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYP

VFPJUDEEHZWETZYVGWHKKQETGFQJNCE    BRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPT

GGWHKK?DQMCPFQZDQMMIAGPFXHQRLG     CYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPTO

TIMVMZJANQLVKQEDAGDVFRPJUNGEUNA    DPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPTOS

QZGZLECGYUXUEENJTBJLBQCRTBJDFHRR   ETOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPTOSA

YIZETKZEMVDUFKSJHKFWHKUWQLSZFTI    FOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPTOSAB

HHDDDUVH?DWKBFUFPWNTDFIYCUQZERE    GSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPTOSABC

EVLDKFEZMOQQJLTTUGSYQPFEUNLAVIDX   HABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPTOSABCD

FLGGTEZ?FKZBSFDQVGOGIPUFXHHDRKF    IBCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPTOSABCDE

FHQNTGPUAECNUVPDJMQCLQUMUNEDFQ     JCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPTOSABCDEF

ELZZVRRGKFFVOEEXBDMVPNFQXEZLGRE    KDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPTOSABCDEFG

DNQFMPNZGLFLPMRJQYALMGNUVPDXVKP    LEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPTOSABCDEFGH

DQUMEBEDMHDAFMJGZNUPLGEWJLLAETG    MFGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPTOSABCDEFGHI

 

Kryptos Part 3                                       Kryptos Part 2  

ENDYAHROHNLSRHEOCPTEOIBIDYSHNAIA   NGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJL

CHTNREYULDSLLSLLNOHSNOSMRWXMNE     OHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJL

TPRNGATIHNRARPESLNNELEBLPIIACAE    PIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLM

WMTWNDITEENRAHCTENEUDRETNHAEOE     QJLMNQUVWXZKRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMN

TFOLSEDTIWENHAEIOYTEYQHEENCTAYCR   RLMNQUVWXZKRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQ

EIFTBRSPAMHHEWENATAMATEGYEERLB     SMNQUVWXZKRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQU

TEEFOASFIOTUETUAEOTOARMAEERTNRTI   TNQUVWXZKRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUV

BSEDDNIAAHTTMSTEWPIEROAGRIEWFEB    UQUVWXZKRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVW

AECTDDHILCEIHSITEGOEAOSDDRYDLORIT  VUVWXZKRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWX

RKLMLEHAGTDHARDPNEOHMGFMFEUHE      WVWXZKRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZ

ECDMRIPFEIMEHNLSSTTRTVDOHW?OBKR    XWXZKRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZK

UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSO    YXZKRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZKR

TWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBNYP    ZZKRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRY

VTTMZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEKCAR     ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCD

Sanborn worked with a retiring CIA employee named Ed Scheidt, Chairman of the CIA Cryptographic Center, to come up with the cryptographic systems used on the sculpture. Sanborn has revealed that the sculpture contains a riddle within a riddle, which will be solvable only after the four encrypted passages have been decrypted. He has given conflicting information about the sculpture’s answer, saying at one time that he gave the complete solution to then-CIA director William H. Webster during the dedication ceremony; but later, he also said that he had not given Webster the entire solution. He did, however, confirm that where in part two it says “Who knows the exact location? Only WW,” “WW” was intended to refer to William Webster. Sanborn also confirmed that should he die before the entire sculpture becomes deciphered, there will be someone able to confirm the solution.^[4]

Solvers

The first person to publicly announce solving the first three sections, in 1999, was Jim Gillogly, a computer scientist from southern California.^[5] After Gillogly’s announcement, the CIA revealed that their analyst David Stein had also solved the same sections in 1998, using pencil and paper techniques, though at the time of his solution the information was only disseminated within the intelligence community, and no public announcement was made.^[6] The NSA also claimed at that time that they had solvers, but would not reveal names or dates until 2000, when it was learned that an NSA team led by Ken Miller, along with Dennis McDaniels and two other unnamed individuals, had solved parts 1–3 in late 1992.^[7] All of these early attempts to solve Kryptos found that K2 ended with WESTIDBYROWS, but in 2006, Sanborn announced that he had made an error in part 2, which changed the last part of the plaintext from WESTIDBYROWS to WESTXLAYERTWO.^[8]

Solutions

The following are the solutions of parts 1–3 of the sculpture.^[9] Misspellings present in the code are included as-is. Kryptos K1 and K2 ciphers are polyalphabetic substitution, using a Vigenère tableau similar to the tableau on the other half of the sculpture. K3 is a transposition cipher, and K4 is still unsolved.

Solution 1

Keywords: Kryptos, Palimpsest

BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION

Solution 2

Keywords: Kryptos, Abscissa

IT WAS TOTALLY INVISIBLE HOWS THAT POSSIBLE ? THEY USED THE EARTHS MAGNETIC FIELD X THE INFORMATION WAS GATHERED AND TRANSMITTED UNDERGRUUND TO AN UNKNOWN LOCATION X DOES LANGLEY KNOW ABOUT THIS ? THEY SHOULD ITS BURIED OUT THERE SOMEWHERE X WHO KNOWS THE EXACT LOCATION ? ONLY WW THIS WAS HIS LAST MESSAGE X THIRTY EIGHT DEGREES FIFTY SEVEN MINUTES SIX POINT FIVE SECONDS NORTH SEVENTY SEVEN DEGREES EIGHT MINUTES FORTY FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYER TWO

On April 19, 2006, Sanborn contacted the Kryptos Group (an online community dedicated to the Kryptos puzzle) to inform them that the accepted solution to part 2 was wrong. He said that he made an error in the sculpture by omitting an “X” used to indicate a break for aesthetic reasons, and that the decrypted text which ended “…FOUR SECONDS WEST ID BY ROWS” should actually be “…FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYER TWO”.^[10]

Note: The coordinates mentioned in the plaintext: 38°57′6.5″N 77°8′44″W; on Google Maps; analysis of the cited location. The point is about 150 feet southeast of the sculpture itself.^[1]

Solution 3

SLOWLY DESPARATLY SLOWLY THE REMAINS OF PASSAGE DEBRIS THAT ENCUMBERED THE LOWER PART OF THE DOORWAY WAS REMOVED WITH TREMBLING HANDS I MADE A TINY BREACH IN THE UPPER LEFT HAND CORNER AND THEN WIDENING THE HOLE A LITTLE I INSERTED THE CANDLE AND PEERED IN THE HOT AIR ESCAPING FROM THE CHAMBER CAUSED THE FLAME TO FLICKER BUT PRESENTLY DETAILS OF THE ROOM WITHIN EMERGED FROM THE MIST X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q ?

This is a paraphrased quotation from Howard Carter‘s account of the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun on November 26, 1922, as described in his 1923 book The Tomb of Tutankhamun. The question with which it ends is that posed by Lord Carnarvon, to which Carter (in the book) famously replied “wonderful things”. In the actual November 26, 1922 field notes, his reply was, “Yes, it is wonderful.”^[11]

Solution 4

Part 4 remains unsolved, though there is an active Yahoo! Group^[12] (formed in 2003) that coordinates the work of over 2000 members toward decryption of the code.

When commenting in 2006 about his error in section 2, Sanborn said that the answers to the first sections contain clues to the last section.^[13] In November 2010, Sanborn released another clue: Letters 64-69 NYPVTT in part 4 encode the text BERLIN.^[14][15]

Related sculptures

Kryptos is the first cryptographic sculpture made by Sanborn. After Kryptos, however, he went on to make several other sculptures with codes and other types of writing, including one called Antipodes which is at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., an “Untitled Kryptos Piece” which was sold to a private collector, and a Cyrillic Projector with encrypted Russian Cyrillic text, which included an extract from a classified KGB document. The cipher on one side of Antipodes repeats the text from CIA’s Kryptos. Much of the cipher on its Russian side is duplicated on the Cyrillic Projector. The Russian portion of the cipher on the Cyrillic Projector and Antipodes was solved in 2003 after Elonka Dunin “led the charge”,^[16] with the ciphertext independently decrypted by Frank Corr and Mike Bales, and plaintext translation from Russian provided by Dunin.^[17]

Pop culture references

The dust jacket of the US version of Dan Brown‘s novel The Da Vinci Code contains two references to Kryptos: One on the back cover (coordinates printed light red on dark red, vertically next to the blurbs) is a reference to the coordinates mentioned in the plaintext of part 2 (see above), except the degrees digit is off by one. When Brown and his publisher were asked about this, they both gave the same reply: “The discrepancy is intentional.” The other reference is hidden in the brown “tear” artwork—upside-down words which say “Only WW knows” which is another reference to Kryptos Part 2.^[2][18]

Kryptos is one of the themes in Dan Brown’s 2009 novel, The Lost Symbol.^[1]

A small version of Kryptos appears in the season 5 episode of Alias, “S.O.S.“. In it, Marshall Flinkman, in a small moment of comic relief, says he has cracked the code just by looking at it during a tour visit to the CIA office. The solution he describes sounds like the solution to the first two parts.

The musical group Between the Buried and Me has a reference to Kryptos in their song “Obfuscation” from the 2009 album, The Great Misdirect.