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Science > Computing > UK > Alan Turing 1912-1954
Alan Turing, who was so impressed with Flowers that he called on him to help codebreak at Bletchley Park.
Photograph: Pictures from History/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
Move over, Alan Turing: meet the working-class hero of Bletchley Park you didn’t see in the movies The Oxbridge-educated boffin is feted as the codebreaking genius who helped Britain win the war. But should a little-known Post Office engineer named Tommy Flowers be seen as the real father of computing? G Sun 12 Oct 2025 13.00 CEST Last modified on Sun 12 Oct 2025 23.00 CEST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/12/
Andy Burnham: men convicted for being gay should get automatic pardons G Friday 17 July 2015 22.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2015/jul/17/
Alan Turing in 1951.
Though he is regarded today as one the most innovative thinkers of the 20th century, at his death many of his wartime accomplishments were classified.
Photograph: Godrey Argent Studio, via The Royal Society
Overlooked No More: Alan Turing, Condemned Code Breaker and Computer Visionary His ideas led to early versions of modern computing and helped win World War II. Yet he died as a criminal for his homosexuality. NYT June 5, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/
Turing, front, in 1939 in Bosham, England, with a friend, Fred Clayton, rear.
Between them are two Jewish fugitives from Germany whom Turing and Clayton helped.
Photograph: REX/Shutterstock
Overlooked No More: Alan Turing, Condemned Code Breaker and Computer Visionary His ideas led to early versions of modern computing and helped win World War II. Yet he died as a criminal for his homosexuality. NYT June 5, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/
1951
The Ferranti Mark 1, also known as the Manchester Electronic Computer in its sales literature, and thus sometimes called the Manchester Ferranti, was produced by British electrical engineering firm Ferranti Ltd.
Among the world's first commercially available general-purpose digital computers. it was the tidied up and commercialised version of the Manchester Mark I.
The first machine was delivered to the University of Manchester in February 1951 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferranti_Mark_1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/
Royal Pardon for Alan Turing BBC 2013
Royal Pardon for Alan Turing Video BBC News report 2013
BBC News report about Royal Pardon for Alan Turing Tuesday 24th December 2013 at 00:08am YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbvCl89JAm0
Related http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-25495315 - 24 December 2013
Turing's Pilot Ace computer - the world's first general purpose computer G 15 April 2013
Alan Turing's Pilot Ace computer - the world's first general purpose computer Video The Guardian 15 April 2013
Built in the 1950s and one of the Science Museum's 20th century icons, The Pilot Ace "automatic computing engine" was the world's first general purpose computer -- and for a while was the fastest computer in the world.
We now take the ability to carry out a range of tasks on our computers for granted, but it all started with the principles developed by mathematician Alan Turing in the 1930s and his design for the Ace.
In this film, Professor Nick Braithwaite of the Open University discusses its significance with Tilly Blyth, curator of Computing and Information at the Science Museum.
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36Ykw1l_KWs
NPR podcasts
Alan Mathison Turing 1912-1954
Within weeks of arriving at Bletchley Park, Turing had specified an electromechanical machine called the bombe, which could break Enigma more effectively than the Polish bomba kryptologiczna, from which its name was derived.
The bombe, with an enhancement suggested by mathematician Gordon Welchman, became one of the primary tools, and the major automated one, used to attack Enigma-enciphered messages.
The bombe searched for possible correct settings used for an Enigma message (i.e., rotor order, rotor settings and plugboard settings) using a suitable crib: a fragment of probable plaintext.
For each possible setting of the rotors (which had on the order of 1019 states, or 1022 states for the four-rotor U-boat variant), the bombe performed a chain of logical deductions based on the crib, mplemented electromechanically.
The bombe detected when a contradiction had occurred and ruled out that setting, moving on to the next.
Most of the possible settings would cause contradictions and be discarded, leaving only a few to be investigated in detail.
A contradiction would occur when an enciphered letter would be turned back into the same plaintext letter, which was impossible with the Enigma. The first bombe was installed on 18 March 1940.
(...)
Hut 8 and the naval Enigma
Turing decided to tackle the particularly difficult problem of cracking the German naval use of Enigma "because no one else was doing anything about it and I could have it to myself".
In December 1939, Turing solved the essential part of the naval indicator system, which was more complex than the indicator systems used by the other services.
That same night, he also conceived of the idea of Banburismus, a sequential statistical technique (what Abraham Wald later called sequential analysis) to assist in breaking the naval Enigma, "though I was not sure that it would work in practice, and was not, in fact, sure until some days had actually broken".
For this, he invented a measure of weight of evidence that he called the ban.
Banburismus could rule out certain sequences of the Enigma rotors, substantially reducing the time needed to test settings on the bombes.
Later this sequential process of accumulating sufficient weight of evidence using decibans (one tenth of a ban) was used in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher.
Turing travelled to the United States in November 1942 and worked with US Navy cryptanalysts on the naval Enigma and bombe construction in Washington.
He also visited their Computing Machine Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
Built in the 1950s and one of the Science Museum's 20th century icons, The Pilot Ace "automatic computing engine" was the world's first general purpose computer – and for a while was the fastest computer in the world.
We now take the ability to carry out a range of tasks on our computers for granted, but it all started with the principles developed by mathematician Alan Turing in the 1930s and his design for the Ace.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2013/apr/12/
Known as the father of the modern computer, Turing led the famous Bletchley Park codebreakers who cracked Enigma, an encryption device used by the Nazis.
Despite his ground-breaking work that is now recognised to have shortened the second world war, he was hounded from the secret service over his sexuality.
Turing faced a criminal charge of indecency over his relationship with another man and after conviction in 1952 was ordered to undergo chemical castration.
In 1954 he took his own life by eating an apple laced with cyanide.
In 2013 he received a royal pardon
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/16/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/ https://www.theguardian.com/science/alan-turing https://www.theguardian.com/film/the-imitation-game
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Bletchley Park > Female codebreakers
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/05/
https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2018/jul/24/
ACE
The Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) was a British early electronic serial stored-program computer design by Alan Turing.
Turing completed the ambitious design in late 1945, having had experience in the years prior with the secret Colossus computer at Bletchley Park.
The ACE was not built, but a smaller version, the Pilot ACE, was constructed at the National Physical Laboratory and became operational in 1950.
A larger implementation of the ACE design was the MOSAIC computer which became operational in 1955.
ACE also led to the Bendix G-15 and other computers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Colossus, Flowers’ groundbreaking computer, at Bletchley Park in the 1940s.
Photograph: Science History Images/Alamy
Move over, Alan Turing: meet the working-class hero of Bletchley Park you didn’t see in the movies The Oxbridge-educated boffin is feted as the codebreaking genius who helped Britain win the war. But should a little-known Post Office engineer named Tommy Flowers be seen as the real father of computing? G Sun 12 Oct 2025 13.00 CEST Last modified on Sun 12 Oct 2025 23.00 CEST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/12/
a computer used at Bletchley Park to decipher messages sent by the Nazis.
Ms. Fawcett was among those who worked there.
Photograph: Science and Society Picture Library/ National Museum of Science and Industry, London, via Getty Images
Jane Fawcett, British Decoder Who Helped Doom the Bismarck, Dies at 95 NYT MAY 28, 2016
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/30/
Colossus
Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in the years 1943–1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher.
Colossus used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to perform Boolean and counting operations.
Colossus is thus regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer, although it was programmed by switches and plugs and not by a stored program.
Colossus was designed by General Post Office (GPO) research telephone engineer Tommy Flowers based on plans developed by mathematician Max Newman at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park.
Alan Turing's use of probability in cryptanalysis (see Banburismus) contributed to its design.
It has sometimes been erroneously stated that Turing designed Colossus to aid the cryptanalysis of the Enigma. (Turing's machine that helped decode Enigma was the electromechanical Bombe, not Colossus.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
The world’s first digital electronic computer, forerunner of the ones reshaping our world today, was built in Britain to revolutionise codebreaking during the second world war – a mind-boggling feat of creative innovation – but Turing wasn’t in the country at the time.
Neither was it conceived by the mostly private school and Oxbridge-educated boffins at Bletchley Park.
Rather, the machine Park staff called Colossus was the brainchild of a degreeless Post Office engineer named Tommy Flowers, a cockney bricklayer’s son who for decades was prevented by the Official Secrets Act from acknowledging his achievement.
Now, with his 120th birthday approaching and a Tommy Flowers Foundation established to right this historical wrong, he is finally getting some of his due, starting with a mural by the artist Jimmy C (best known for the David Bowie mural in Brixton, south London) at the National Museum of Computing.
(...)
After 10 months working round the clock, it was done.
Colossus weighed a ton and occupied a whole room.
Where Heath Robinson used two tapes, Flowers’ machine allowed the Tunny wheel patterns to be programmed into it using plugboards and switches.
His original plan was to digitise the Tunny cyphertext being attacked, too, but this was deemed problematic for long messages, so it remained on tape, as rows of holes and spaces representing five-bit binary numbers.
The teleprinter tape sprocket holes, conventionally used to drive the tape forward, served to synchronise the whole machine, functioning like the “clock” in a modern computer.
Which is what Flowers and his team of young Post Office engineers had built: the world’s first special purpose electronic digital computer.
Delivered in a Post Office truck to BP on 18 January, the prototype was assembled by Flowers’ people and worked almost immediately.
Its first job, for a cyphertext whose decrypt was known, took 10 minutes.
Flowers later marvelled that “when the first machine was constructed and running, they couldn’t believe it”.
More were ordered, to be produced in a commandeered Birmingham Post Office factory at a rate of one a month, with the enhanced Colossus II involved in a race to be ready for D-day in June 1944 (though whether it had a specific role in D-day is unclear).
Subsequent models included many new features and innovations, with a later example including what one of the Colossus team proudly describes as “a relatively large semi-permanent memory”, equivalent to Ram.
By VE Day 10 machines were working round the clock in two giant steel-framed buildings: a codebreaking factory.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/12/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/12/
Heath Robinson
Heath Robinson was a machine used by British codebreakers at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park during World War II in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher.
This achieved the decryption of messages in the German teleprinter cipher produced by the Lorenz SZ40/42 in-line cipher machine.
Both the cipher and the machines were called "Tunny" by the codebreakers, who named different German teleprinter ciphers after fish.
It was mainly an electro-mechanical machine, containing no more than a couple of dozen valves (vacuum tubes) and was the predecessor to the electronic Colossus computer.
It was dubbed "Heath Robinson" by the Wrens who operated it, after cartoonist William Heath Robinson, ho drew immensely complicated mechanical devices for simple tasks, similar to (and somewhat predating) Rube Goldberg in the U.S.
The functional specification of the machine was produced by Max Newman.
The main engineering design was the work of Frank Morrell at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill in North London, with his colleague Tommy Flowers designing the "Combining Unit".
Dr C. E. Wynn-Williams rom the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Malvern produced the high-speed electronic valve and relay counters.
Construction started in January 1943, the prototype machine was delivered to Bletchley Park in June and was first used to help read current encrypted traffic soon afterwards.
As the Robinson was a bit slow and unreliable, it was later replaced by the Colossus computer for many purposes, including the methods used against the twelve-rotor Lorenz SZ42 on-line teleprinter cipher machine (code named Tunny, for tunafish).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Max Newman 1897-1984
British mathematician and codebreaker. His work in World War II led to the construction of Colossus, the world's first operational, programmable electronic computer, and he established the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at the University of Manchester, which produced the world's first working, stored-program electronic computer in 1948, the Manchester Baby.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Thomas Flowers 1905-1998
Tommy Flowers: nothing like the machine he proposed had ever been contemplated.
Photograph: courtesy of Kenneth Flowers
Move over, Alan Turing: meet the working-class hero of Bletchley Park you didn’t see in the movies The Oxbridge-educated boffin is feted as the codebreaking genius who helped Britain win the war. But should a little-known Post Office engineer named Tommy Flowers be seen as the real father of computing? G Sun 12 Oct 2025 13.00 CEST Last modified on Sun 12 Oct 2025 23.00 CEST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/12/
engineer with the British General Post Office.
During World War II, Flowers designed and built Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer, to help decipher encrypted German messages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/12/
Joan Elisabeth Lowther Murray 1917-1996
née Clarke
Joan Clarke's ingenious work as a codebreaker during WW2 saved countless lives, and her talents were formidable enough to commandt he respect of some of the greatest minds of the 20th Century, despite the sexism of the time. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29840654 - 10 November 2014
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
http://www.bbc.com/news/
Jane Fawcet 1921-2016
(born Janet Carolin Hughes)
Jane Fawcett (...) was a reluctant London debutante when she went to work at Bletchley Park, the home of British code-breaking during World War II, and was credited with identifying a message that led to a great Allied naval success, the sinking of the battleship Bismarck
(...)
she played her most significant historical role as an eagle-eyed decoder in British wartime intelligence.
In May 1941, Germany’s mightiest warship, had become a prime target after it sank one of England’s most powerful vessels, the battle cruiser Hood, in the battle of the Denmark Strait, between Iceland and Greenland.
Much of the British fleet was in search of the Bismarck, which was presumed to have withdrawn to the North Atlantic around Norway.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/30/
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/30/
Germany
Enigma machines > The M4
an estimated 1,500 (Enigma machines) were built as Nazi Germany fought to fend off the Allies.
(...)
The M4, with four rotors, is the scarcest of all Enigma encryption machines and was used on naval submarines.
Its manufacture was ordered by German Admiral Karl Donitz (1891-1980) due to concerns that the three-rotor Enigma machine had been compromised following the capture of a U-boat in August 1941.
The model was made rarer still by the sinking of 70% of German U-boats in the later stages of World War II, in part due to the breaking of the Enigma code
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/23/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/29/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/23/
Germany
Lorenz teleprinter
More complex than the famous Enigma code, the Lorenz cipher could be broken only thanks to the mathematician Bill Tutte [1917-2002], who deduced the architecture of a Lorenz machine without ever having seen one.
Solving the problem also led to the creation of Colossus, the world’s first programmable computer, which Tommy Flowers, a Post Office engineer, invented to work out the wheel positions on the Lorenz encryption machine and reduce the time taken to decrypt messages from weeks to hours.
The decoding of the top-secret Lorenz messages is credited with shortening the war and saving countless lives.
“It was the highest possible level of security used by the German high command,”
(...)
It was thanks to the breakthroughs by Tutte and Flowers that allied commanders could be certain Hitler’s high command had bought their bluff that the D-Day invasion force would be landing at Calais, rather than on the beaches of Normandy.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/29/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/29/
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/29/
Enigma
The Enigma machine is a cipher device developed and used in the early- to mid-20th century to protect commercial, diplomatic, and military communication.
It was employed extensively by Nazi Germany during World War II, in all branches of the German military.
The Enigma machine was considered so secure that it was used to encipher the most top-secret messages.
The Enigma has an electromechanical rotor mechanism that scrambles the 26 letters of the alphabet.
In typical use, one person enters text on the Enigma's keyboard and another person writes down which of the 26 lights above the keyboard illuminated at each key press.
If plaintext is entered, the illuminated letters are the ciphertext.
Entering ciphertext transforms it back into readable plaintext.
The rotor mechanism changes the electrical connections between the keys and the lights with each keypress.
The security of the system depends on machine settings that were generally changed daily, based on secret key lists distributed in advance, and on other settings that were changed for each message.
The receiving station would have to know and use the exact settings employed by the transmitting station to decrypt a message.
Although Nazi Germany introduced a series of improvements to the Enigma over the years that hampered decryption efforts, cryptanalysis of the Enigma enabled Poland to first crack the machine as early as December 1932 and to read messages prior to and into the war.
Poland's sharing of their achievements enabled the Allies to exploit Enigma-enciphered messages as a major source of intelligence.
Many commentators say the flow of Ultra communications intelligence from the decrypting of Enigma, Lorenz, and other ciphers shortened the war substantially and may even have altered its outcome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
“Substitution cyphers” such as those the Nazis favoured have existed for at least two millennia.
The first known use is recorded by Julius Caesar in his book Gallic Wars, where he describes encrypting a message to his besieged general Cicero by substituting Greek letters for Roman ones.
One of the most famous cyphers would subsequently be named for him and involve replacing the original letters of a message (the plaintext) with those a certain number of places along in the alphabet.
Substitution cyphers present obvious points of attack to an enemy.
Being able to guess any of the words, for instance “Heil Hitler” at the end of a message, will offer a way in.
Letters that appear often, or rarely, or mostly together in the encrypted cyphertext, reflecting patterns in the original message, can offer a toehold.
For two millennia cryptography has been a battle of wits between code makers and breakers.
By the time we reached the typewriter-sized Enigma machine, three rotor wheels, like the barrels of a combination lock, were being used to addle plaintext messages.
But where the barrels of a combination lock have 10 possible starting positions (0 to 9), these had 26, each corresponding to a letter of the alphabet.
And then came the fiendish bit: each letter activated a different substitution alphabet – in one position b might become f, in another q.
What’s more, with every plaintext letter typed into the machine, at least one wheel rotates, so changing the substitution alphabet and muddying the patterns on which codebreakers rely.
The British had known about Enigma since 1921, when its manufacturer tried to sell them on it.
Dillwyn “Dilly” Knox, a brilliant codebreaker who was said to have been a lover of John Maynard Keynes at Eton and would work closely with Turing at BP, brought one back from Vienna for testing in 1926, when it was found to have small but significant vulnerabilities and rejected.
By 1939 and the outbreak of war, a gifted Polish mathematician named Marian Rejewski had broken it “by hand”, with paper and pencil, and with colleagues designed a machine they called Bomba to speed the process.
One of Turing’s several acts of genius was to break the more complex naval Enigma machine, before which U-boat wolf packs ran riot in the North Atlantic.
Another was designing his own machine, called the Bombe in tribute to his Polish predecessors but vastly more sophisticated than theirs.
There’s no way to exaggerate the importance of these contributions.
And yet greater challenges lay in wait, leading to a crisis with an outcome no one could have predicted.
Enter Tommy Flowers.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/12/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/12/
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