Fredrik Gripenstierna

Fredrik Gripenstierna (1728–1804) was a Swedish nobleman and member of the clan. He is remembered for having built a cipher device regarded as the world's first cryptographic machine.

Early life Fredrik Gripenstierna's father was (1668–1746), a land-owner of Ekerö. His mother was Hedvig Polhem (1705–1769), the daughter of Christopher Polhem, a well-known Swedish inventor and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

In his youth, he attended Uppsala University before joining the Swedish Army. In 1748, at the age of 20, he served as an officer on the island fortress of Sveaborg. He left the military in 1752. In 1755, he was promoted to the aristocratic rank of freiherr and from then on lived off the income generated by his manorial estate. Because Polhem's original drawings also no longer exist, it is impossible to tell to what extent Gripenstierna incorporated his own ideas into the design.

The device appears to have been similar to the later Jefferson–Bazeries cylinder, with 57 discs rotating on a central axis and engraved round the outer edge with the letters of the Swedish alphabet. In addition, the discs included a small assortment of special characters such as a space and a full stop.

Legacy In the 1970s, Boris Hagelin of Crypto AG built two replicas of Gripenstierna's cipher machine based on surviving documents from the 1786 demonstration at Drottningholm Palace. In 1976, Bengt Beckman produced a sketch of the device as it was reconstructed by Hagelin.