“Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician. Born in London in 1912, he studied at both Cambridge and Princeton Universities. He was already working part time for the British Government’s Code & Cypher School (GCCS) before the Second World War broke out. In 1939, Turing took up a full time role at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, where top secret work was carried out to decipher the military codes used by Germany and its allies.”-own.org.uk.
“The main focus of Turing’s work at Bletchley was in cracking the ”Enigma” code. The Enigma was a type of enciphering machine used by the Germans to send messages securely. Although Polish mathematicians had worked out how to read Enigma messages and had shared this information with the British, the Germans increased its security at the outbreak of war by changing the cipher system daily. This made the task of understanding the code even more difficult.”-iwm.org.uk.
pic of ”Enigma” 👇
“Turing played a key role in this, inventing, along with a fellow code-breaker Gordon Welchman, a machine known as the Bombe…From mid 1940, German Air Force signals were being read at Bletchley and intelligence gained from them was helping the war effort.”-iwm.org.uk. ”The allied powers had retrieved an Enigma machine from the battlefields…when messages were typed into the machine, the result would be a series of seemingly random letters.”-themobilityforum.net.
Pic of the Bombe 👇
“The Polish insights saved Turing a year of work.”- nature.com. 9/3/18.
The German Enigma, ”in order to successfully intercept and decipher an extremely complicated encrypted code,” the chances of actually deciphering the code was 1 in 150 million, million, million, ”and the combination for the code was changed every 24 hours. If Turing’s team could decipher the codes, it would give Allied powers an enormous strategic advantage in every battle, which would swiftly end the war.”-themobilityforum.net.
“The great mind (of Turing) searched relentlessly for a flaw or weakness in the code and discovered, after much trial and error, that when a specific letter was typed in, it would never be itself in the code. For instance, when an ”S” was typed in, it would never be an ”S” within the coded message. To test his finding, he had to unearth a word or phrase. The Germans used often Enigma-encrypted messages. The phrase he found was “Heil Hitler” at the end of every code. It is ironic: their tribute to a tyrant leader ultimately led to their defeat.”-themobilityforum.net.
“Cryptography, the science of making and breaking encoded messages, is one of our oldest mathematical disciplines. Julius Caesar apocryphally encoded all of his communications with his officers in the field with a basic substitution cipher that made them unintelligible unless you knew how many positions to shift each letter in the alphabet to decode it.”-interestingengineering.com. 10/15/21.
”Turing then solved the German naval indicator system used to encrypt its Enigma messages, which was a more complex Enigma…human error on the part of the operator was often a key factor in breaking that day’s Enigma settings…”-interestingengineering.com. 10/15/21.
During the middle of the war, the Germans developed a ”much more sophisticated cipher machine that the British codenamed “Tunny.” In 1942, Turing cracked Tunny messages. It gave the British ”detailed knowledge of German strategy, information that changed the course of the war.”-bbc.com. 6/19/12. The broken messages were simply labeled ”Turingery.” Captain Jerry Roberts stated: ”We were using Turingery to read what Hitler and his Generals were saying to each other over breakfast, so to speak.”-bbc.com. 6/19/12.
“Turing stands alongside Churchill, Eisenhower, and a short glory list of other wartime principals as a leading figure in the Alllied victory over Hitler.”…He ”shortened the war in Europe by as many as 2-4 years.”-bbc.com. 6/19/12.
“If Turing and his group had not weakened the U-boats hold on the North Atlantic, the 1944 Alliied invasion of Europe, the D-Day landings, could have been delayed, perhaps by about a year or even longer…”-bbc.com. 6/19/12. ”If U-boat Enigma had not been broken, and the war had continued for another 2-3 years, a further 14-21 million people might have been killed.”-bbc.com. 6/19/12.
Legacy: ”In 1952, Alan Turing was arrested for homosexuality, which was then illegal in Britain. He was found guilty of ”gross indecency” (this conviction was overturned in 2013) but avoided prison sentence by accepting chemical castration. In 1954, he was found dead from cyanide poisoning. An inquest ruled that it was suicide.”-iwm.org.uk.
“The legacy of Alan Turing’s life and work did not fully come to light until long after his death. His impact on computer science has been widely acknowledged: The annual ”Turing award” has been the highest accolade in that industry since 1966. But the work of Bletchley Park and Turing’s role there in cracking the Enigma code, was kept secret until the 1970’s, and the full story was not known until the 1990’s. -iwm.org.uk.
pic of Alan Turing 👇
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An excellent tellinhg of a y inquest time in our history. Puzzles are made to be solved. Thank you for your input!!
Wow, that’s insane it wasn’t known until years later. Meanwhile he was a hero but was later punished bc he was too smart and I highly doubt it was bc of his sexual preference. If he could do that imagine what else he either figured out or could of. Great read!