The Enigma Machine
The machine that shortened the war by two years
What was it?
The Enigma machine was a machine that coded and desiphered messages. It was invented by a German engineer and was used by the Germans in WW2 and it took years for it to be desiphered. The Germans believed it to code messages and make these impossible to desipher, however with the help of a Polish spy who managed to aquire a model of one and give it to the English, they managed to desipher it.
The
The Enigma machine coded and encripted messages so that the Germans could contact each other without their codes being intercepted.
Enigma
Enigma was a brand of cipher machines and before the war was available to buy comercially. This was until the Millitary realised its potential and they then used a more developed version to encript their messages.
Machine
The Enigma wheels were the parts of the machine that chose the code for that day. There were called Rotors and rotated with each of the keys pressed.
The Bombe
The Bombe was a machine used by the British to help decipher the Enigma Machine. It was made in 1939 at Bletchley Park and used a series of rotors to decode the messages sent by the Germans. Alan Turing was the man that was mainly involved in designing the British Bombe. The Polish had designed a Bombe as well before Alan Turing however this Bombe only worked when there were specific conditions with the coding. This meant that the effectiveness of the Polish Bombe was drastically minimized.
Alan Turing
Alan Turing was a mathematician at Cambridge when the war started. HE was identified as a likely candidate for code breaking and to help with understanding the Enigma Machine. He went to work at Bletchly Park, the base for the government's Code and Cypher School. It was Turing that devised a number of technique's for breaking the German's codes, including the Bombe.