Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels

[davidjackson]

It is true his is a very simple cipher and therefore one might regard that as commonplace knowledge that he could have found easily.

To sum up my own personal thoughts on Fontana: I think he was one of those people who took a quantitative leap with common knowledge. He was familiar with basic ciphers; he took the idea of a cipher and turned it into a code for personal reasons. Most probably for the first time in history. His idea was an antecedent of the same one that caused educated 18th/19th century Western gentleman to write in Greek or Latin - to hide ideas from the common person, to ensure that only the educated could read his work.
He wasn't trying to hide his work from the world, he was trying to ensure that only those worthy of access could read it.