We Didn't Start the Fire

Billy Joel — 1989

The key text behind the Beale Cipher 4 animation

Pop History 1949 – 1989 Beale Key-Text

What is a Beale cipher? Each word in a chosen "key text" is numbered sequentially from 1. To encode a letter, you pick any word whose first letter matches — and write down that word's number. The decoder needs the same key text to reverse it. The cipher is named for Thomas J. Beale, who allegedly used this technique to hide the location of buried treasure in 1820s Virginia.

"We Didn't Start the Fire" is an ideal Beale cipher key text. Billy Joel packed four decades of headline events into the song — from Harry Truman to the Berlin Wall — creating a dense, varied vocabulary that covers virtually every letter of the alphabet multiple times. The more words per letter, the harder the cipher is to crack: the same plaintext letter maps to dozens of different numbers each encoding run.

The song's relentless pace — rapid-fire proper nouns, brand names, and world events — also gives the cipher a rich mix of short words (one-digit positions) and long ones (three-digit positions), which shows off the digit-pile animation best.

Try the Cipher → How the animation works →

Key-Text Index

Below is the one-to-one correspondence between each letter of the alphabet and every word position in the lyrics whose first letter matches. When encoding the letter F, for example, the cipher picks any number from the F list — so the same plaintext letter produces a different cipher number every time, preventing frequency analysis.

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We Didn't Start the Fire

Billy Joel • Released October 3, 1989

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Ready to try the cipher?

Use these lyrics as your key text and encode your own secret message in Beale Cipher 4.

Open Beale Cipher 4 How the Algorithm Works