Bacon cipher
Hiding words in a’s and b’s.
Where it came from
The Bacon cipher was described by Sir Francis Bacon in 1605 — centuries before binary computing. He encoded letters as 5-bit sequences of two symbols (then "a"/"b", now 0/1), and suggested hiding them in innocent text via font styles.
It is the conceptual ancestor of steganography and binary encoding: meaning rides on a difference the eye is trained to ignore.
How it works
Each letter becomes five symbols from a two-symbol alphabet (e.g. A=aaaaa, B=aaaab). You can then disguise the string inside another message — say, by varying letter case or typeface.
UWC encodes text to Bacon and decodes it back in your browser, working with the classic a/b mapping.