Wilfrid Michael Voynich (31 October 1865 – 19 March 1930), born Michał Habdank-Wojnicz, was a Polish

Poland

Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

 revolutionary, British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 and American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 antiquarian and bibliophile, and the eponym

Eponym

An eponym is the name of a person or thing, whether real or fictitious, after which a particular place, tribe, era, discovery, or other item is named or thought to be named...

 of the Voynich manuscript

Voynich manuscript

The Voynich manuscript, described as "the world's most mysterious manuscript", is a work which dates to the early 15th century, possibly from northern Italy. It is named after the book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who purchased it in 1912....

.

Biography

Michał Wojnicz was born in Telshi

Telšiai

Telšiai , is a city in Lithuania with about 35,000 inhabitants. It is the capital of Telšiai County and Samogitia region, and it is located on Lake Mastis.-Names:...

, a town in then Kovno Governorate

Kovno Governorate

The Kovno Governorate or Government of Kovno was a governorate of the Russian Empire. Its capital was Kovno . It was formed on 18 December 1842 by tsar Nicholas I from the western part of the Vilna Governorate, and the order was carried out on 1 July 1843. It used to be a part of Northwestern Krai...

, which was part of the Russian Empire

Russian Empire

The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...

, now it is Telšiai, a town in Lithuania

Lithuania

Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...

— into a Polish-Lithuanian noble family, he was the son of a titular counsellor.

In 1885, in Warsaw

Warsaw

Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...

, Wojnicz joined Ludwik Waryński

Ludwik Warynski

Ludwik Tadeusz Waryński was an activist and theoretician of the socialist movement in Poland.-Biography:...

's revolutionary organization, Proletarjat. In 1886, after a failed attempt to free from the Warsaw Citadel

Warsaw Citadel

Cytadela is a 19th-century fortress in Warsaw, Poland. It was built by order of Tsar Nicholas I after the suppression of the 1830 November Uprising in order to bolster imperial Russian control of the city. It served as a prison into the late 1930s.- History :The Citadel was built by personal...

 fellow-conspirators who had been sentenced to death, he was arrested by Tsarist police and, in 1887, sent to penal servitude

Katorga

Katorga was a system of penal servitude of the prison farm type in Tsarist Russia...

 at Tunka

Tunka

Tunka is a village in Tunkinsky District of the Buryat Republic, Russia, located east of Baikal in the Tunka Valley.In the 19th century, it served as a settlement to where a large number of political prisoners were forcibly resettled. Among them was a group of all Catholic priests arrested during...

.

In 1890 he escaped from Siberia

Siberia

Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...

 and arrived in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, adopting as his first name his nom de guerre, Wilfryd. In 1893 he married a fellow-revolutionary, Ethel Lilian Boole

Ethel Lilian Voynich

Ethel Lilian Voynich, née Boole was a British novelist and musician, and a supporter of several revolutionary causes. She was born in Cork. Her father was the mathematician George Boole. Her mother was feminist philosopher Mary Everest, niece of George Everest and an author for the...

, daughter of the famous British mathematician, George Boole

George Boole

George Boole was an English mathematician and philosopher.As the inventor of Boolean logic—the basis of modern digital computer logic—Boole is regarded in hindsight as a founder of the field of computer science. Boole said,...

.

With Stepniak, a fellow revolutionary, he founded the Society of Friends for a Free Russia (see p 2 of the article at http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materials/pulc/pulc_v_28_n_1.pdf) in London.

After the 1895 death of Stepniak in a railway crossing accident, the Voyniches (as they had anglicized their surname

Surname

A surname is a name added to a given name and is part of a personal name. In many cases, a surname is a family name. Many dictionaries define "surname" as a synonym of "family name"...

) ceased revolutionary activity. In 1898 Voynich opened a bookshop in London, followed by another in 1914 in New York

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. He was much involved with the handling of early books and wrote a number of catalogues and other texts on the subject.

Voynich died in New York in 1930.

Voynich Manuscript

The most famous of Voynich's possessions was a mysterious medieval manuscript

Manuscript

A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...

 which he had acquired in 1912 at the Villa Mondragone

Villa Mondragone

Villa Mondragone is a patrician villa originally in the territory of the Italian commune of Frascati , now in the territory of Monte Porzio Catone...

 in Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

. It is written in an unknown script which several famous linguists

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 and cryptologists have been unable to decrypt since the manuscript's first public presentation in 1915.