The first confirmed owner of the Voynich manuscript was George Baresch, a Prague alchemist who had mentioned in a letter that he had found it in his library “taking up space.”
He learned that the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, in Rome, had published a Coptic dictionary and claimed to have deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Baresch sent a sample copy of the script to Kircher, asking for clues to reveal what the mysterious manuscript meant.
It was purchased in 1912 by a Polish-American antiquarian bookseller, named Wilfred Voynich (pictured) (1865-1930), from which it takes its name.
His 1639 letter to Kircher is the first confirmed mention of the manuscript found to date.
Kircher asked for the book, but Baresch would not give it to him because he valued possessing it more than knowing its true meaning.
After Baresch’s death, the manuscript passed to his friend Jan Marek Marci, who worked at Charles University in Prague.
A few years later, Kircher finally got his hands on the book when Marci sent it to him, as he was an old friend and correspondent.
When Johannes Marcus sent it to Kircher, they found inside the cover a letter written on August 19, 1665 or 1666.
He claims that the book belonged to Emperor Rudolph II (1552-1612), who paid 600 gold ducats (about 4.5 pounds of gold) for it.
The letter was written in Latin and had been translated into English.
The litany of previous owners attempting to unravel its secrets continues further, as the manuscript becomes increasingly integrated into European folklore.
The manuscript is also believed to have been in the possession of ‘Jacobj aTepen’, or Jakub Horcicky of Tepenec, a doctor who lived between 1575 and 1622 and was known far and wide for his medicinal use of herbs.
No records of the book have been found for the next 200 years, but in all likelihood it was stored with the rest of Kircher’s correspondence in the library of the Collegio Romeo.
It probably remained there until the troops of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy captured the city in 1870 and annexed the Papal States.
It was purchased in 1912 by a Polish-American antiquarian bookseller named Wilfred Voynich (1865-1930), from which it takes its name.
Alan Turing (pictured), the brilliant mind who led the campaign to crack the Enigma code at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, tried to understand it but found it impenetrable.
His acquisition of the manuscript is different from that of its previous owners, from whom it passed from hand to hand.
According to legend, during an acquisitions trip he stumbled upon a trunk containing the rare manuscript now known as the Voynich manuscript.
He kept it in his possession until his death and exhibited it to the public for the first time in 1915.
It became further etched into folklore and the mystery surrounding it deepened from that point on as its unbreakable code attracted the greatest minds for decades, all trying to discover its meaning.
Wilfred later moved from Europe to New York and, after his death, the guardian of the manuscript became his wife Ethel Voynich (1864-1960).
After his death, the manuscript came into the hands of another dealer named Hans P. Kraus (1907–88), who eventually donated it to the Yale Library in 1969.
Alan Turing, the brilliant mind who led the campaign to crack the Enigma code at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, tried to understand it but found it impenetrable.
Theodore C Peterson, a priest, embarked on the project of making a manual copy of the Voynich manuscript.
He completed it in 1944 and each page of the replica notes unusual features, which may be of interest when trying to decipher it, such as strange character sequences and frequently used words.
He worked on Voynich until his death and helped a Danish botanist and zoologist, Theodore Holm of Catholic University, tentatively identify 16 plant species on Voynich.
William Friedman (1891-1969) is remembered as one of the world’s leading cryptologists and became involved with Voynich in the early 1920s, when he corresponded with his namesake.
During his work, he developed the theory that the Voynich manuscript represented a text in a synthetic language (using or describing inflection).
It took research associate Dr Gerard Cheshire, pictured, two weeks, using a combination of lateral thinking and ingenuity, to identify the language and writing system of the famous inscrutable document, he said.
John Tiltman was a British intelligence specialist who worked in association with William Friedman.
Friedman asked Tiltman for his opinion on the text of the Voynich manuscript and sent him copies of the final document.
He concluded that the text is too complicated to be the result of a simple cipher and the result of applying a standard cipher to plain text.
He spent some time discussing the option of a synthetic or “universal” language proposed by Friedman.
The FBI also tried it during the Cold War, apparently thinking it might have been communist propaganda.
The US National Securities Agency collaborated with German codebreaker Erich Hüttenhain based on the earlier work of British codebreaker John Tiltman because they had the idea that it might contain communist propaganda.
In the end, a consensus emerged: that the manuscript was either unsolvable or written in gibberish, like an elaborate practical joke.
Dr. Gerard Cheshire, a researcher at the University of Bristol, claimed that it was written in a dead language, Proto-Romance, and then, studying the symbols and their descriptions, he deciphered the meaning of the letters and words.