When astronomers first looked at Saturn through telescopes in the early seventeenth century, they saw something they couldn’t explain. While other planets looked neatly round, Saturn had large protrusions sticking out on either side. It was Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens who solved the mystery: Saturn had a large ring around its middle. But strangely, when he first published this monumental discovery, Huygens concealed it in the form of an anagram: “aaaaaaacccccdeeeeehiiiiiiillllmmnnnnnnnnnooooppqrrstttttuuuuu.”
Huygens wasn’t the first person to hide scientific knowledge in plain sight, explains historian Nicole Howard. Howard argues that disguising discoveries helped scientists stake their claim to being first while not giving away results to rivals. Huygens himself had used this strategy before.
In 1655, the Dutchman sent a letter about a star he was studying in the vicinity of Saturn to English mathematician John Wallis. As the star danced around the planet, Huygens tracked its motion using a 12-foot refracting telescope. He had discovered Saturn’s moon Titan and described its motion to Wallis with the phrase “admovere oculis distantia sidera nostris, vvvvvvvcccrrhnbqx.” When unscrambled, it discloses in Latin that a moon revolves around Saturn in sixteen days and four hours.
Scientists often used letters, along with pamphlets, flyers, and books, to convey new knowledge. These publications “anticipated the academic journal,” Howard writes, “providing concise articles that allowed knowledge to be circulated with efficiency.” But research still ran on “fame, patronage, and priority,” she explains. These incentives could clash with the growing need for scientific collaboration, so anagrams became a tool in the “balancing act between openness and concealment.”
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In his pamphlet on Titan, De Saturni Luna (1656), Huygens previewed his larger Saturn project using the ring anagram and explained why he hid the conclusion. Howard quotes Huygens, writing that “if perhaps anyone believes to have found the same thing, he has the time to make it known and he will not be said to have taken it from us, nor we from him.” In part, Howard explains, Huygens also wanted time to make more observations and strengthen his claim.
He first revealed the solution privately in letters to other scientists. Unscrambled and translated, it reads: “Saturn is encircled by a thin, flat ring, nowhere touching, inclined to the ecliptic.” The recipients took the theory to meetings of scientifically inclined people, and in these salons, the idea got its first hearing.
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Completed in 1659, Huygens’s book Systema Saturnium was specifically designed to win over skeptical people. He used illustrations of Saturn and the ring, showing how the ring would appear differently depending on Saturn’s position in the solar system. This explained the shifting appearance of Saturn over time.
Huygens and his allies worked for years to win people over. Howard describes how one Italian physicist created a physical model “so that from seventy-five meters away, the illuminated globe of Saturn looked much like it would form one of Huygens’s telescopes.” The evidence mounted, and by 1665, even Huygens’s most fervent opponents became convinced that Saturn had a ring.
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