How long does it take to read The Woman Who Smashed Codes?
Jason Fagone
The Woman Who Smashed Codes by Jason Fagone takes about 8 hours 30 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 8 hours 30 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2017. 464 pages, about 127,600 words.
17 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 14 hours 11 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 8 hours 30 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 19 minutes |
The page count is the median across 2 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Traces the life of Elizebeth Smith, who met and married groundbreaking cryptologist William Friedman and worked with him to discover and expose Nazi spy rings in South America by cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine. "In 1916, a young Quaker schoolteacher and poetry scholar named Elizebeth Smith was hired by an eccentric tycoon to find the secret messages he believed were embedded in Shakespeare's plays. She moved to the tycoon's lavish estate outside of Chicago expecting to spend her days poring through old books. But the rich man's close ties to the U.S. government, and the urgencies of war, quickly transformed Elizebeth's mission. She soon learned to apply her skills to an exciting new venture: codebreaking--the solving of secret messages without knowledge of the key. Working alongside her on the estate was William Friedman, a Jewish scientist who would become her husband and lifelong codebreaking partner. Elizebeth and William were in many ways the Adam and Eve of the National Security Agency, the U.S. institution that monitors and intercepts foreign communications to glean intelligence.^ In [this book, journalist] Jason Fagone chronicles the life of this extraordinary woman who played an integral role in our nation's history--from the Great War to the Cold War. He traces Elizebeth's developing career through World War I, Prohibition, and the struggle against fascism. She helped catch gangsters and smugglers, exposed a Nazi spy ring in South America, and fought a clandestine battle of wits against Hitler's Reich, cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine used by German operatives to conceal their communications. And through it all, she served as muse to her husband, a master of puzzles, who astonished friends and foes alike. Inside an army vault in Washington, he worked furiously to break Purple, the Japanese version of Enigma--and eventually succeeded, at a terrible cost to his personal life.^ Fagone unveils for the first time America's…
Subjects: Cryptography, Cryptographers, Biography, History, United states, biography, Enigma cipher system
