Frank Rowlett
| Frank B. Rowlett | |
|---|---|
Frank Rowlett.
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| Born |
May 2, 1908 Rose Hill, Lee County, Virginia |
| Died | June 29, 1998 (aged 90) |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Cryptography |
| Alma mater | Emory & Henry College |
Frank Byron Rowlett (May 2, 1908 – June 29, 1998) was an American cryptologist.
Rowlett was born in Rose Hill, Lee County, Virginia and attended Emory & Henry College in Emory, Virginia. In 1929 he received a bachelor's degree in mathematics and chemistry. He was hired by William Friedman as a "junior cryptanalyst" for the Signals Intelligence Service (SIS) on April Fools' Day, 1930; shortly after, he was followed into SIS by Abraham Sinkov and Solomon Kullback.
During the 1930s, after a lengthy period of training, Rowlett and his colleagues compiled codes and ciphers for use by the U.S. Army and began solving a number of foreign, notably Japanese, systems. In the mid-1930s, they solved the first Japanese machine for encipherment of diplomatic communications, known to the Americans as RED. In 1939–40, Rowlett led the SIS effort that solved a more sophisticated Japanese diplomatic machine cipher, codenamed PURPLE by the U.S. Once, when asked what his greatest contribution to that effort had been, Rowlett said, "I was the one who believed it could be done."
Rowlett also played a crucial role in protecting American communications during World War II, making fundamental and innovative contributions to the design of the SIGABA cipher machine. Its security was an important factor in saving American lives in combat. (In 1964, Congress awarded Rowlett US$100,000, equivalent to $770,000 in 2016, as partial compensation for his classified cryptologic inventions).
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