Alan Turing
Who Is He
Born
Alan Mathison Turing
(1912-06-23)23 June 1912
London, England
Died
7 June 1954(1954-06-07) (aged 41), Cheshire, England
Residence
Wilmslow, Cheshire, England
Nationality
British
Education
Princeton University (1936–1938)
Parents
Julius Mathison Turing,
Ethel Sara Turing (Stoney).
Siblings
John Turing
The Enigma
The Enigma machine is a piece of spook hardware invented by a German and used by Britain's codebreakers as a way of deciphering German signals traffic during World War Two. It has been claimed that as a result of the information gained through this device, hostilities between Germany and the Allied forces were curtailed by two years.
Enigma 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. Over the years the basic machine became more complicated as German code experts added plugs with electronic circuits.
It was only after they had handed over details to the Polish Cipher Bureau that progress was made. Helped by its closer links to the German engineering industry, the Poles managed to reconstruct an Enigma machine, complete with internal wiring, to read the German forces’ messages between 1933 and 1938.