In the realm of cryptography, the Vigenère cipher stands as a testament to the ingenuity and complexity of early encryption methods. I have to admit that it is my personal favorite of the “old” ciphers. The Vigenère cipher, often attributed to Blaise de Vigenère, was actually first described by Giovan Battista Bellaso in 1553. Bellaso’s description of a polyalphabetic substitution cipher, which later became known as the Vigenère cipher, predated de Vigenère’s work by over a century. De Vigenère’s contribution was the development of a text autokey cipher, which was misattributed to him due to his association with the Vigenère cipher. The Vigenère cipher itself was not invented by de Vigenère but rather by Bellaso and later misattributed to him.