Alphabet Wheel


An alphabet wheel, often called a cipher clock, is a graphical picture of values that can be used to represent the letters of the alphabet. Most wheels have the plain alphabet in the inside the circle and the cipher alphabet on the outside. Using the picture below you can see that the letter "A," inside the circle, is equal to the cipher character "B." Thus, when you write the enciphered word "CAT" it would actually be written as "DBU." Deciphering is made easier when the alphabet wheel is used.






The example above is fairly easy to decipher if you don't have the original alphabet wheel. This is due to the pattern see in both the plain and enciphered alphabets surrounding the wheel. Both alphabets are in sequence, in order. To make your alphabet wheel cipher harder to break you may want to arrange letters in a more random fashion or add in extra characters or symbols to distract the decipherer.

You can even make up your own alphabet wheel cipher with special symbols for each letter of the plain alphabet. Would you use a pattern, or do it randomly? Why? What is the benefit of using patterns versus random assignment of letters?