imo, "The first free national pager" was pinprick cipher in UK after 1840 ))) "A dot or pinprick concealment cipher is a common classical encryption method in which dot or pinprick is placed above or below certain letters in a piece of writing... ...Victorians used the pinprick trick too, not for spies but to dodge high postage fees (rates varied but often around a shilling per hundred miles or so for a letter before the 1840 Penny Post reforms). Newspapers mailed free, so they’d pinprick messages on the front page and send those instead of letters." I wrote abt it here: https://aillia.substack.com/p/steganography-101-hiding-wa…