George Washington's Mount Vernon Mount Vernon Cypher Wheel Secret Decoder

It is an excellent decoder for recreational use. Please let me know if the cipher decoder is later available with changeable disks. You would then have 12! = 479,001,600 reorderings available.

The print is very light, and also the characters don't line up exact. A bit disappointed.

It has quite a few problems. The thing can't be disassembled, so it's impossible to scramble the order of the wheels, which is what makes the key for the cipher. The numbers of each wheel are printed on the sides, which is a nice touch except that it renders many lines with a number or delta or omega instead of a letter. This cuts down on the number of rows you can pick to be the ciphertext. Also, 5 out of the first 6 wheels are duplicated exactly and the 6th is only different in a few places, so not 12 alphabets but almost 6 and then the same 6 again.The main problem is that the letters aren't evenly spaced. It's really bad for the numbers on each wheel. Each number takes up WAY more space than a single letter, but other letters are above or below. What this means is that when you line up your plaintext perfectly, almost none of the rows on the rest of the device line up at all. You should have 25 options of another row to pick from randomly (part of what made it so secure for it's time) but instead you generally only have 2 or 3.So, it's a fun little wooden toy that looks a bit like a cipher device, but not a real cipher device. Worth it as a souvenir, but not a great gift for someone into cryptography. They'll notice everything wrong with it. The unfortunate thing is that I don't know if anyone manufactures one that actually works half as well as the one Jefferson invented.