A bit about Alan Turing

A lot of us now know about Alan Turing thanks to a movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch called ‘The Imitation Game’. For any history buffs, he was the genius behind breaking the enigma code, used by the Germans during WWII.

After earning a Mathematics degree from a scholarship at King’s College in Cambridge, and two years at Princeton, he went on to be hired by the British governments code breaking department and in 1939, took on a role at Bletchley Park that would forever cement his name in the history books. It’s here that Alan Turing, along with Gordon Welchman saved countless allied lives by developing ‘the Bombe’, which was “derived from Bomba, a similar machine developed by the Poles shortly before the outbreak of WWII” (Unknown, Unknown). The machine was developed to decipher German communications through an ‘Enigma machine’ during WWII. The Enigma was revolutionary in transcribing coded information as it “allowed an operator to type in a message, then scramble it by using three to five notched wheels, or rotors, which displayed different letters of the alphabet. The receiver needed to know the exact settings of these rotors in order to reconstitute the coded text.” (Lycett, Unknown). What the ‘Bombe’ did was based on the idea of “traffic analysis could be used to predict the text of some parts of the enciphered messages” (Sale, Unknown). Based on the assumption of some letters, settings could be input into the ‘Bombe’ and it could test whether there were any possible Enigma settings, faster then what a group of workers could do. What's now considered as the first computer, shortened the war significantly thus saving countless lives and started a new technological era.

Alan Turing’s personal life was far from troubles, and although he greatly contributed to shortening the war, he was arrested in 1952 for homosexuality which was illegal in Britain at the time. His life tragically ended short in 1954 after he was found dead from cyanide poisoning and an inquest ruled that it was suicide. After a pardoning in 2013, a law was passed “if the Home Office agrees that the offence is no longer an offence under current law, they will automatically be pardoned.” (Unknown, 2016)

(Clements, Unknown)

Here, you can see the machine in action at Bletchley Park in 2012.

References

Clements, K., Unknown. How Alan Turing Cracked The Enigma Code. [Online]
Available at: http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/how-alan-turing-cracked-the-enigma-code
[Accessed 25 10 2016].

Lycett, A., Unknown. More information about: Enigma. [Online]
Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/topics/enigma
[Accessed 25 10 2016].

Sale, T., Unknown. Virtual Wartime Bletchley Park. [Online]
Available at: https://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/virtualbp/tbombe/tbombe.htm
[Accessed 25 10 2016].

Unknown, 2016. 'Alan Turing law': Thousands of gay men to be pardoned. [Online]
Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37711518
[Accessed 25 10 2016].

Unknown, Unknown. Bombe. [Online]
Available at: http://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/bombe/
[Accessed 25 10 2016].