The Computer That Helped Win World War II

The man whose codebreaking may have helped to shorten the Second World War by two years met a grim reward: in 1952 Alan Turing was convicted simply for being gay and chemically castrated; a royal pardon came only in 2013, decades after his death

Here are two facts about the same man, and they sit badly together. The first: Alan Turing’s work at Bletchley Park was crucial to the effort to break German encrypted communications, part of an intelligence achievement credited with shortening the war in Europe by years. The second: the same country he helped defend prosecuted him over a consensual relationship with another man. I keep coming back to how neatly the first fact should have protec…

The Computer That Helped Win World War II

One summer day in 1941, a British radio operator was monitoring German military frequencies and heard something unexpected in her headphones. A later report called it “strange new music.” Sounding unlike the familiar Morse dit-dit-dah of enciphered messages sent over the German Enigma network, the “new music” was a rhythmic warble of binary teletype code being transmitted at high speed.Germany’s wartime engineers had developed a radically new en…