At the close of World War I, German engineer Arthur Scherbius invented the Enigma Machine, which went on to help the Nazi government to come close to securing victory in World War II. However, it isn’t Scherbius’ work that history remembers, it is the code breaking genius of Alan Turing who headed up the Enigma-beating team, Ultra, at Bletchley Park. Later this month his computational skills will shortly be the focus of the “Codebreaker – Alan Turing’s Life and Legacy” exhibition at the Science Museum.
Opening on the 21st June, the exhibition is set to run through to the 31st July 2013, so unless you’re heading out on a space mission there’s not much excuse for missing it. Codebreaker celebrates the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth.
Though the coding behind Germany’s first military Enigma Machine was cracked by the Polish Cipher Bureau in 1932, the added complexity of later machines made breaking the code next to impossible as the Nazi military blitzkrieg warmed up to its full brutal capabilities. However, the Bletchley team’s Ultra breakthroughs caught up with the new complexities of the system thanks to operational errors and the acquisition of machine boards from the front, which has been described as being integral to the early end to World War II.
It isn’t just Turing’s cipher skills that are to be celebrated in the Codebreaker exhibition, his input to modern day computing will also be a feature. Contributing to early computer programming and artificial intelligence, Turing’s life and work is given the retrospective it genuinely deserves at the Science Museum.
