Ovaltine Ciphers
I did some reading on Ovaltine’a Wikipedia page and discovered that Ovaltine sponsored radio Orphan Annie (OA) and Captain Midnight. They would frequently give listeners proof of purchase premiums which were usually decoder rings.
wiki link - look under popular culture
Likewise I did a quick google search on Decoder Rings and immediately get results about Ovaltine and the radio shows, in addition to A Christmas Story (one user brought this back up in a separate reddit post about the Braille cipher).
Its unclear to me if the decoder rings use a particular cipher algorithm and if it’s the Caesar algorithm. In general if we use Ceasar 37, due to the math of modulo this would be the same as Ceasar 11… 37.. 11… 7 years, 3 months, 11 days hmmm.
Anyways, I’m wondering if we should be using a decoder ring to decode a message 🤔. Someone also pointed out the photos were from 1959 but I cannot find a specific decoder ring from 1959. The cipher key changes each year supposedly. The one Ralphie uses in A Christmas Story was 1940. Either way we would need a message to decrypt and I can’t think of any prominent seemingly decipherable messages on the show or Brit’s social media page.
If anyone else can feed into this delusion and look for any known ciphers. The braille cipher mentioned earlier doesn’t seem to be decipherable so I’m unsure about that one.