George Fabyan had too much money and some highly eccentric ideas. In 1912, the millionaire built a private research enclave on his Geneva estate. He called it Riverbank. He hired Elizabeth Wells to prove that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays using a hidden bilateral cipher. She teamed up with a young geneticist named William Friedman. They didn't prove the Shakespeare theory, though. Instead, they fell in love, got married, and essentially birthed modern American cryptology. When World War I broke out, the US military had absolutely zero code-breaking infrastructure. So, Washington sent raw German intercepts straight to Geneva. The Friedmans cracked them. They also ran a training school for army officers right on the grounds. Homemade paper slides, cipher wheels, and pure grit.
But codebreaking was only half the story. Fabyan also obsessed over the physics of sound. To study it, he built an acoustics laboratory with concrete walls eighteen inches thick. He needed to block the rumbling of nearby train tracks. Harvard physicist Wallace Sabine ran the early experiments. He died in 1919. His cousin Paul took over and spent decades standardizing how we measure sound transmission. They manufactured precision tuning forks here. Some of these steel forks eventually calibrated early NASA equipment. The lab still runs acoustic tests today.
