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Timeline BC |
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~ 1900 BC: Egyptian writers use non-standard  Hieroglyphs in inscriptions of a royal tomb; supposedly this is not the first but the first documented example of written cryptography
1500 an enciphered formula for the production of pottery is done in Mesopotamia
parts of the Hebrew writing of Jeremiah's words are written down in "atbash", which is nothing else than a reverse alphabet and one of the first famous methods of enciphering
4th century Aeneas Tacticus invents a form of beacons, by introducing a sort of water-clock
487 the Spartans introduce the so called "skytale" for sending short secret messages to and from the battle field
170 Polybius develops a system to convert letters into numerical characters, an invention called the Polybius Chequerboard.
50-60 Julius Caesar develops an enciphering method, later called the Caesar Cipher, shifting each letter of the alphabet an amount which is fixed before. Like atbash this is a monoalphabetic substitution.
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Invention
According to the WIPO an invention is a "... novel idea which permits in practice the solution of a specific problem in the field of technology." Concerning its protection by law the idea "... must be new in the sense that is has not already been published or publicly used; it must be non-obvious in the sense that it would not have occurred to any specialist in the particular industrial field, had such a specialist been asked to find a solution to the particular problem; and it must be capable of industrial application in the sense that it can be industrially manufactured or used." Protection can be obtained through a patent (granted by a government office) and typically is limited to 20 years.
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