Anniversary · Calibre U30A · 2018 · twenty pieces

THE HALTER CIPHER

Each of the twenty Vianney Halter Anniversary watches carries a coded grid — a stepped block of letters, different on every piece. No block means anything on its own. Halter's condition was that the message could only be read if all twenty owners found each other. This page is where the blocks are being collected.

The twenty watches. Recovered blocks are marked in gold.

01

The twenty blocks

Reproduced cell for cell, including where each row starts. The stepped outline may matter as much as the letters — twenty blocks of differing widths is what an interlocking set looks like.

capital letter — case is marked, so it carries meaning apostrophe — distinct from a comma

02

How to read it

Halter's own description is the most useful thing anyone has said about these grids: he calls it an encrypted message, split twenty ways, decipherable only once the owners share it between them. Encrypted, not written in another language — which is worth stating plainly, because the pixelated modular typeface has led people (this archive included, at first) to guess at Klingon. Nothing Halter or his retailers have published supports that, and the letters themselves argue against it.

No. 15 holds 38 letters. Between them they cover 24 of the 26 letters of the English alphabet — every one except i and l. That is not the letter distribution of a sentence in any language; it is close to an inventory. The top row points the same way: stuvwxyz, eight letters running in order, then an empty cell, then a lone mark, making that row ten wide when nothing below it exceeds nine. It is set apart in every dimension available, which is an odd way to write a message and an ordinary way to write a key.

The working guess, then: not twenty fragments of a sentence but twenty pieces of a substitution table, which is why i and l — the two characters hardest to tell apart by hand — may have been left out on purpose. Transcribe exactly regardless. Capitals stay capital, apostrophes never become commas, and the blank cells stay blank, because under a cipher a single altered character is not a typo but a different answer.

Nothing here is decoded. These are observations drawn from one block, and one block is precisely the amount of evidence Halter designed this puzzle to make useless.

03

Send yours in

  1. Photograph the card and the rotor. The edition card is easier to read; the rotor is what proves it. Shoot square on so the grid isn't distorted.
  2. Type it row by row, one character per cell. Use spaces at the start of a row to push it across to the column where it actually begins. The stepped shape is evidence.
  3. Copy exactly what you see. Capitals stay capital — no. 15 has a capital S and a capital P among otherwise lowercase letters. Apostrophes sit high in the cell and commas sit on the line; they are different characters. If you can't tell, put a question mark, because a wrong character is worse than a gap.
  4. Give your watch number. It's what places your block against the other nineteen.

One line per row. Leading spaces set where the row starts. Use _ for a cell that is drawn but empty.

Nothing is published until it has been checked against a photograph. Nothing about you is published unless you ask for it.

04

What this is

In 2018 Vianney Halter marked twenty years of his own name on a dial with the Anniversary: twenty watches, 38 mm, steel with gold rivets, calibre U30A turning under the patented sapphire mystery rotor. On each of the twenty rotors he printed one fragment of an encrypted message, built so that it could only be read once the owners shared it among themselves — his stated intention being to link the twenty of them to each other.

The connective theme runs deeper than the code. Halter has said that when the Anniversary took shape he knew he wanted to work with people he had an affinity for, and so he took the movement from a friend and fellow member of the AHCI rather than building it in-house — the first time a calibre in one of his watches came from another maker's bench. He has never named the friend. The watch world has generally settled on Andreas Strehler, an attribution repeated widely enough to be near-consensus but never confirmed by either watchmaker, and it is recorded here as exactly that.

Which makes the edition of a piece: a movement sourced from a friend, a case in a steel he had never used and has not used since, and a message deliberately broken so that twenty strangers would have to find one another to read it. The whole watch is an argument about being connected to other people.

This page is the pooling. It is run by collectors, has nothing to do with the atelier, and exists only so that twenty people don't have to be in the same room to read the answer.