Gadgetory

welcome to Bletchley Park a grand estate in Buckinghamshire England despite its serene appearance this manor and its surrounding buildings were a vital part of Allied victory in World War two when they became the epicenter of Britain's wartime code-breaking efforts this country is at war with Germany by the end of 1944 ants had fallen to Hitler's invasion forces Britain was being pummeled by nightly bombing raids while merchant ships were hunted in the Atlantic by German u-boats Allied forces were desperate for any strategic advantage and that included decoding Germany's encrypted radio communications you're standing in the office of a man who was instrumental in setting up Bletchley as Britain's code-breaking HQ and overseeing operations in the crucial first years of the war commander Alistair Denniston the first head of the UK's government code and cypher school Bletchley offered easy access to London as well as university towns Oxford and Cambridge from which Dennison recruited top minds including Gordon welchman and Alan Turing Denniston was unwavering in his commitment to gathering Nazi intelligence but having worked in code-breaking for many years including throughout World War one he had no illusions about the scale of the problem facing the Bletchley team that problem was enigma a mechanical device used by the German military to encrypt communications typing on an Enigma machine illuminated alternative coded letters determined by a series of rotors each of which had a possible 26 settings adding even more security was the plug board which swapped letters with another letter of the operators choice to decode a message all you needed was to replicate those settings on your Enigma machine and the scrambled letters would become readable text however with over a hundred and fifty million million million possible configurations deciphering enigma was virtually impossible even if you guess the settings the Germans were using regular configuration changes meant your luck would run out often within a day and yet at bletchley cryptographers were able to read enigma communications throughout most of the war here's how away from the luxury of the mansion the heavy lifting of breaking enigma happened in prefabricated Hut's like this one built on park grounds deciphering enigma began with the polish who'd cracked a machine before the war and shared their knowledge with France and Britain in July 1939 on the eve of conflict when Germany started switching its cipher systems on a daily basis however Bletchley task became infinitely more complex luckily the Germans made mistakes predictable messages like weather reports gave Bletchley cribs best guesses that helped calculate the days in it my settings plus enigma had a fatal design flaw a letter could never be encoded as itself this fact combined with cribs gave code breakers of vital foothold in crunching possible settings combinations thirdly Bletchley relied on pinches the capture of German code books which were a treasure trove of code cracking information Germany would alter its Enigma devices though and keeping on top of decrypt was a constant years long struggle right at the heart of that struggle was history's most famous code breaker you're in the hut eight office of Alan Turing the London born mathematician who was instrumental in cracking the notoriously complex German naval enigma and developed the Bamber isthmus technique which leveraged probabilities to calculate the likely settings of Enigma machines cheering's wartime activities saved lives diverting Allied ships away from the jaws of u-boat Wolfpack's but his later contributions also resonate today cheering spreaded as the father of computer science and the field of artificial intelligence and without his pioneering work modern technology could look very different although he was gay in 1941 Turing was briefly engaged to fellow codebreaker Joan Clarke seven years after the war Turing was prosecuted for homosexual acts which at the time was still a criminal offence in the UK choosing chemical castration as an alternative to prison cheering died just two years later his death ruled suicide by cyanide poison the end of Turing's life is a story of bitter injustice but his legacy endures in the progress he made during his time at Bletchley perhaps his most famous contribution is the bomb machine for decoding enigma the design of which was unveiled in 1939 with colleague Gordon welchman adding the vital diagonal board refinement a year later cheering new enigma could be cracked through brute force testing of potential settings combinations but the process was far too lengthy for a human to handle the bomb named in tribute to the Polish bomba decryption machine was an electromagnetic marble sending current through circular drums corresponding to sets of enigma rotors crunching the many thousands of permutations to calculate enigma settings based on code breakers cribs the replica bomb that currently resides in Bletchley Park took 13 years to complete but it's wartime equivalents branched out much more quickly cheering later visited the u.s. to advise on bombe production while another code breaking machine developed at Bletchley Colossus is considered the world's first programmable electronic digital computer owing to the secrecy surrounding wartime code breaking the full extent of Bletchley zhh role in world war ii and the pioneering work of its many cryptographers would only be revealed decades later but visitors to Bletchley Park today are finally able to hear the full story we hope you've enjoyed this brief look inside one of history's most fascinating sites