The Enigma Machine
Is the code to hard for the allies?
What is the 'Enigma Machine'?
An Enigma machine is any of a family of related electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines used for the encryption and decryption of secret messages. Enigma was invented by the German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I. The early models were used commercially from the early 1920s, and adopted by military and government services of several countries — most notably by Nazi Germany before and during World War II. Several different Enigma models were produced, but the German military models are the ones most commonly discussed.
The ''Bombe'' Code Cracker!
The ''bombe'' was an electromechanical device used by British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted signals during World War II. The US Navy and US Army later produced machines to the same functional specification, but engineered differently.
The initial design of the bombe was produced in 1939 at the UK Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park by Alan Turing, with an important refinement devised in 1940 by Gordon Welchman. The engineering design and construction was the work of Harold Keen of the British Tabulating Machine Company. It was a substantial development from a device that had been designed in 1938 by Polish Cipher Bureau cryptologist Marian Rejewski, and known as the "cryptologic bomb".