The Enigma Machine
Behind the Machine.
Enigma.
About the machine.
Two Dutch Naval officers invented a machine to encrypt messages in 1915. This was the Enigma machine. 30,000 machines were being sold in the mid 1920's to the German military over the next 2 decades. A world leading crypt analysis was set up by the Pole and they also hired leading mathematicians such as Marian Rejewski. Two new roters were added to the Enigma machine in 1938, making it harder for the poles to read the traffic. Britain and France were asked to help them with the analysis and codebreaking of the German messages. Before Poland was invaded, Britain smuggled out the Enigma replica machines. Blechley Park code breakers worked around the clock to decipher the German Enigma communications (which they had intercepted). British engineer (Tommy Flowers) created Colossus in 1943. Code breaking was changed by Colossus from electro-mechanical to electronic. The first ever modern day computer had been created. 5,000 characters per second could be read by Colossus. Codebreaking played a key role in victories such as D-Day, meaning it shortened the length of WW2.