Auguste Kerckhoffs wrote his treatise 'La Cryptographie militaire'. Although Kerckhoffs was Dutch, he spent most of his life in France, and his writings provided the French with an exceptional guide to the principles of cryptanalysis. By the time the First World War had begun, three decades later, the Franch military had implemented Kerckhoffs' ideas on an industrial scale. While lone geniuses like Painvin sought to break new ciphers, teams of experts, each with specially developed skills for tackling a particular cipher, concentrated on the day-to-day decipherments. Time was of the essence, and conveyor-belt cryptanalysis could provide intelligence quickly and efficiently.
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