Hello friends and welcome to the eighth episode in our series, How Women One Run More

Two.

Shakespeare and Al Capone.

What could possibly be a link between these two men who were born centuries apart?

A master codebreaker named Elizabeth Smith Friedman.

For name doesn't sound familiar, there's a reason for that.

Even though she is one of the pioneers of cryptanalysis, very few people knew about her war-changing

contributions until after her files were declassified in 2008.

I'm Sharon McMahon and here's where it gets interesting.

When asked about her life story, Elizabeth often said that it all started with an encounter

at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Before that she was a frustrated young woman with big dreams.

Elizabeth was born as Clara Elizabeth Smith in 1892 as the youngest in a large Indiana

Quaker family where she always felt a bit out of place.

These rate siblings were content to live quiet, small town farm lives, but she had bigger

aspirations.

Elizabeth wanted to be unoriginal and she spent her childhood looking for ways to rebel.

In her diary she wrote, I am never quite so gleeful as when I am doing something labeled

as an ought not.

Like you ought not to do that.

That's when she was the happiest.

This attitude meant that Elizabeth had a difficult relationship with her father who saw her as

...