From Enigma to iPhone

On a wet and cloudy morning in London, we rushed out of the hotel and took short train ride to Bletchley. As I clamored through the London station, I picked up a copy of The Daily Telegraph and found a fun page of crosswords, Sudoku, and other puzzles, which provided some fun entertainment for me and some of my classmates. As I think about this fun moment now, however, I cannot help but think that this was almost too perfect. For almost 80 years ago, people just like us, who loved puzzles and mental challenges, were drawn to this little town to apply their skills to the nation's greatest challenges and pave the way for the technology that runs modern society.

At a large Bletchley estate, the Bletchley Park campus rose, and its grounds housed the great British codebreakers. These men and women, in WW2, broke both the German Enigma and the Lorenz ciphers among several other enemy ciphers, helping to give the allies a strategic advantage in the war, and the first part of our day trip was dedicated to learning about them. We started with an introduction to the Enigma's mathematics. Our tour guide showed us the complex coding methods within the Enigma machine, which give it 158 million million million possible cipher combinations! To handle this massive amount of data in a timely manner, they needed a little innovation, and the next thing we saw, a reconstruction of the Bombe, was the key. This machine was able to churn through the possible combinations and derive which cipher was correct, saving the operators countless hours of work. Yet, some Germans understood that the Enigma could be solved (though many like Hitler himself felt it was unbreakable), and this led to the more complicated and difficult Lorenz cipher. Once, the British found this cipher, the codebreakers needed an even more complicated machine to handle the new combinations of settings, and this ultimately led to the creation of Colossus. This massive hunk of machinery filled the majority of its room, and it churned through the many possible setting of the Lorenz cipher to give a possible setting for the codebreakers to try on their own version of the Lorenz machine called Tummy. These machines helped to efficiently break the most complicated German codes for the Allies.

Yet, Colossus was not just important for its codebreaking work, for it was also one of the major technical leaps that led to the modern computer, and our next stop on the campus, the National Museum of Computing, chronicled that part of the story. Starting with the world's oldest working computer the WITCH, we saw some of the many early computers. These computers took up full rooms and some even seemed temperamental to the weather outside! Then, we learned how new innovations like transistor, disk drives, and integrated circuits all rocketed the development of computers to make them more reliable, quicker, and powerful, and in less than 70 years, they have led all the way to the fancy iPhone in my pocket and laptop I am typing on!

After this final tour, we headed back on the train to London, but the entirety of our Bletchley Park experience was fascinating and well worth the trip!.The great ingenuity of a few men and women working hard to save their nation helped to pave the way for the development of the modern technology many of us could not live without. It are these men and women and their stories, that paved the way from the Enigma to the iPhone, and their stories are cemented in the little town of Bletchley to inspire future generations of like-minded people to continue innovating and pave the path far into the future.

Some Photos from the Day!
An Enigma Machine (Left) and a Lorenz Machine (Right)

The WITCH Computer