Gadgetory

well this is the Enigma machine it's basically a typewriter keyboard with a light panel now the keyboard only has 26 letters there's no space bar numbers or special characters and that was done on purpose because those kinds of characters would help give away the code the way it works is quite simple really it's a typewriter so you press a key that looks like a typewriter and eventually a light bulb lights up and the light bulb that lights up will light up a letter that's different than the key that you pressed and so that's the coding now here is the German plug board plug board allows you to switch one letter to another let's say the e if I press the E and I want to change that e to a different letter I would put that in here and let's say I want to change it to an I I would move it here the second thing they would have to do is open up this machine and here's the inner lid and then here are the three rotors and the way you would take those out is you have to release the pressure on them like this and that loosens them up so that now that they can be removed each wheel has a notch and that notch tells the next wheel next to it when to advance one and so that notch is movable and the way you do that is you move this little lever out of the way you can see it's now in position four which is the letter D and I'm given a letter to move it to let's say the letter eight now each one of these has a Roman numeral on them one through five and I happen to have one three and two here and let's say that that's the that's the position that you're told is an operator put them in three two one now I'm going to put those in the machine I would close this up and the next thing I would do is I would set these on the correct positions for the day let's say it's five ten fifteen so I will put this on position five the next one on position ten and the next one on position 15 and I can start taking in receiving messages let's say I want to send a simple message like Hello okay I've got my days setting I'm all ready to go so I'll press first the H for hello and I note the letter that's that lights up it's a cue then I press the E and a cue lights up again now I'm going to press the L twice and I get an E and a K you notice two different letters lit up I press the O and an H lights up so now I would give this message to the person that would send this q q EK h now i'm the the new operator and now i'm going to type in these letters and note what letters light up it's like type the q and an H lights up I press again now an e then I type the e letter and you see an L light up I press the K and you see the L lights up again and then an H and the Oh lights up so I just now decoded that message to the original message that was sent to me hello the beginnings of computing is directly attributable to the Enigma if you had a hundred thousand people with a hundred thousand Enigma machines all testing different settings of that enabling machine to brute strength break it it would and they could do that test a different setting once a second twenty four by seven would take twice the age of the universe to break the code so that's why the Germans had such confidence that it wouldn't be broken when we look the technology that was available they just did not foresee that Turing would embed a computer to break the code