itsy bitsy
Cabinet Magazine has a minor history of miniature writing. Whether for covert communication, skirting of religious edicts, public spectacle, or sheer experimentation, micrographia has been valued for centuries.
1941 C.E.
Robert Hooke’s three-hundred-year-old vision of conveying secret information through micrography is realized. The first microdot, disguised as a common sentence-ending period, is discovered on a typed envelope carried by a German agent. Using a process developed by Emanuel Goldberg in the 1920s, the Germans employ a reverse microscope to shrink information down to a one-millimeter dot, which is then punched out with a syringe and glued over a printed period or under a stamp. British mail censors dub the microdots “duff” because they are scattered throughout letters like raisins in the stiff flour pudding known as plum duff.
