Arvid Gerhard Damm

Arvid Gerhard Damm (7 Aug 1869 – 7 Nov 1928) was a Swedish engineer and inventor. He designed a number of cipher machines, and was one of the early inventors of the wired rotor principle for machine encipherment. The company, AB Cryptograph, was an early predecessor of Crypto AG.

A prototype of one of Damm's machines.

Biography

Originally a textile engineer, he was headmaster of a weaving school in Borås, Sweden, before moving to Finland to work as a manager of a textile factory. Although already married with a son, he fell in love with a circus performer from Hungary whose opposition to a relationship he overcame by arranging a sham civil wedding ceremony in 1900 with an officiant and two witnesses. His new “wife”, with whom he then the lived for 19 years, only became aware of the situation when Damm found a new romantic interest and wanted a divorce. After a long and acrimonious legal battle, in which he denied ever being married to her and accused her of being a spy, he was ordered to pay alimony but refused and fled to France.

Damm designed a number of crypto machines, based on patents filed in Sweden, the US and many other countries. His most notable invention is that of the rotor principle, laid down in a patent application filed in Sweden on October 10, 1919, three days after Hugo Koch applied for a similar invention in the Netherlands.

To exploit his ideas, a company named AB Cryptograph was founded. Originally founded as a patent consortium, Cryptograph was established June 15, 1915. The company itself began a year later. Cryptograph never became economically viable despite capital infusions by Emanuel Nobel, brother of Alfred Nobel. When Damm’s legal shenanigans in connection with his faked marriage became too much of an embarrassment, he was forced to give up his position in the company and moved to France where he died in 1928. In 1925, Boris Hagelin was placed in charge of the management of the company and the development of its products, having joined AB Cryptograph in 1922.[1]

Damm's first machines for Cryptograph were the "Mecano Cryptographer Model A-1" and its interoperable portable counterpart, Model A-2, both produced in 1917. The A-1 was fitted with a keyboard. A later version (1921) could print the plaintext together with two copies of the plaintext onto tape. The machine used a chain of links, which could be reassembled by the user as part of the key. Some of the links moved a 25-disk "key body" forward, some back.

The A-21 (1923) and the A-22 (1925) consisted of a cylinder with 26 mixed alphabet strips around it. Another strip, bearing the normal A–Z alphabet was nearby, and could take one of two positions, dependent on the movement of chain similar to the A-1. In operation, the cylinder rotated one step, as did the chain, controlling the position of the reference alphabet. To encipher or decipher (the system was set up to be reciprocal), a letter could be read off from the reference alphabet to a cylinder alphabet using a slit at the top of the machine.

Achievements and legacy

Damm was an ingenious inventor and quick to adapt to new possibilities. In the 1910s and early 1920s no other cryptographic inventor had patents and working machines of such complexity and diversity. Damm was one among the four inventors of permutation wheels (the other three being Scherbius, Koch and Hebern). He was first with a number of innovations and ideas such as

  • Storing a cryptographic key as a binary sequence, first as a chain of links, later on a pinwheel
  • The use of an ”Influence letter”, an autokey function
  • Cryptologic checksums to prevent illegal manipulation
  • Superenciphering digital codes into pronouncable letter groups. This reduced the cost of telegraphy with up to 50%
  • Designing electromechanical equivalents of delay shift registers and XOR gates.

Damm´s strength lay in his ideas and clever constructions while his mechanical designs often were unreliable. And without high reliability it was hard to find customers.

Despite having no cryptographic experience, Boris Hagelin managed to use the ideas of Damm´s B-13 to develop a crypto machine, B-21, which was to compete with Enigma for sales to the Swedish General Staff. In 1928 that order was secured. Boris Hagelin also participated in the development of a machine based on A-22, called A-34. There are no records about a serial production of the A-34.

Inventions, production and sales

The following cryptomachines were designed and built, based on Damm´s inventions.[2][3][1]

Model Name Year Notes
Cryptotyper 1914 Joint invention with George Lorimer Craig. Developed 1912-1914. A working prototype was shown to the War Office and the Colonial Office in London in July 1914. The machinery was left with George Craig in Huddersfield, UK and is probably not extant.[4]
A-1 Mecano Cryptographer 1917 The compatible pair A-1 and A-2 were delivered from production early 1917, 30 A-1´s and 10 A-2´s. Altogether 18 A-1´s were sold, five of them to the Finnish government.
A-2 Hand cryptographer 1917
Cylinder cipher 1918 Only a prototype produced.
A-1(b) Electro Mechanical Cryptographer 1921 These were modernised versions of the machines from 1917. A-1(b) printed output on paper strips. Only one machine A-1(b) was sold.
A-2(b) Hand Cryptographer 1922
B-1 Electrocryptograph Encryptor/Transmitter 1919
1922		 This machine was designed and shown in a working model in the summer of 1919. It was a machine for automated encryption of telegraphic traffic. Production of machines took a long time and it was not until 1922 that two machines were delivered to the Swedish PTT for operational testing. There were operational problems with the machines and no more machines were produced.
A-4 Code superencryptor A-4 1922 The machine was intended for superencipherment of codes. Codes were a common way of encipherment but some were wellknown and others had low security, hence superencipherment was needed. As a benefit transmission costs for the messages could be cut to the half. Only two machines were produced.
B-13 Electrocryptograph Encryptor/Transmitter 1925 B-13 was a development from B-1 with simplified modular design to improve reliability. 20 machines were produced, a number of them sold to South East Asia via the Dutch East India Company.[5]
A-21 Portable cryptographer 1923 A-21 was a prototype for the A-22 and probably produced in only one copy. At least 20 A-22´s were produced but no sales are recorded. A copy of all of machines except (1) and (6) are still extant in museums or collections.
A-22 1925

Patents

The following patents concerning cryptography were issued to Damm in Sweden, with their United States counterparts:

References
  1. Widman, Kjell-Ove and Wik, Anders. Damm and AB Cryptograph. FRA historiska skrifter. Bromma, 2017.
  2. 100 Jahre Boris Hagelin 1892-1992. Crypto Hauszeitung Nr. 11. Zug, Schweiz 1992. P 40-43.
  3. Kruh, Louis. A catalog of historical interest. Cryptologia vol 2 1978, p 243-252 and 339-349.
  4. McKay, C.G. Arvid Damm makes an offer. Cryptologia vol 18 p 243-249, 1994.
  5. Lindmark, G.A. Manuscript without title, dated 15 March 1959. Boris Hagelin´s private archive, Krigsarkivet, Stockholm, vol F6:11.

Sources
  1. Beckman, Bengt. Codebreakers: Arne Beurling and the Swedish crypto program during World War II, p. 17-19.
  2. Kahn, David. The Codebreakers, 1967, 2nd edition 1996, Chapter 13.
  3. McKay, C.G. and Beckman, Bengt. Swedish signal intelligence 1900-1945. Frank Cass, London 2003. p 25-28.

Further reading

Original documents can be found at two main sources:

  1. ”Svartlösa och Öknebo häradsrätt” 1921-22. Stadsarkivet, Stockholm. Court protocols containing information about Damm´s private life (in Swedish).
  2. Boris Hagelin´s archive. Krigsarkivet, Stockholm. 55 volumes of which 15 contain documentation about Damm and the Cryptograph company from the years 1916-1930.

Boris Hagelin´s memoirs exists in three versions. Comparison with original documents from Cryptograph shows many errors. The “Hauszeitung” from 1992 is the best. The English “The story of the Hagelin cryptos” has more errors than the German “Die Geschichte der Hagelin Cryptos”.

See also
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