When was enigma machine invented

Britain and her allies first understood the problems posed by this machine in , when Hans Thilo Schmidt, a German spy, allowed his French spymasters to photograph stolen Enigma operating manuals. Initially, however, neither French nor British cryptanalysts could make headway in breaking the Enigma cipher. It was only after they had handed over details to the Polish Cipher Bureau that progress was made.

TThe Germans were convinced that Enigma output could not be broken, so they used the machine for all sorts of communications on the battlefield, at sea, in the sky and, significantly, within its secret services.

The British described any intelligence gained from Enigma as 'Ultra', and considered it top secret. Only a select few commanders were made aware of the full significance of Ultra, and used it sparingly to prevent the Germans realising their ciphers had been broken. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving.

The Tunny teleprinter communications network, a harbinger of today's mobile phone networks, spanned Europe and North Africa, connecting Hitler and the Army High Command in Berlin to the front-line generals.

Turing's breakthrough in yielded the first systematic method for cracking Tunny messages. His method was known at Bletchley Park simply as Turingery, and the broken Tunny messages gave detailed knowledge of German strategy - information that changed the course of the war.

Turingery was the seed for the sophisticated Tunny-cracking algorithms that were incorporated in Tommy Flowers' Colossus, the first large-scale electronic computer. With the installation of the Colossi - there were ten by the end of the war - Bletchley Park became the world's first electronic computing facility. Turing's work on Tunny was the third of the three strokes of genius that he contributed to the attack on Germany's codes, along with designing the bombe and unravelling U-boat Enigma.

Turing stands alongside Churchill, Eisenhower, and a short glory-list of other wartime principals as a leading figure in the Allied victory over Hitler.

There should be a statue of him in London among Britain's other leading war heroes. Some historians estimate that Bletchley Park's massive codebreaking operation, especially the breaking of U-boat Enigma, shortened the war in Europe by as many as two to four years. If Turing and his group had not weakened the U-boats' hold on the North Atlantic, the Allied invasion of Europe - the D-Day landings - could have been delayed, perhaps by about a year or even longer, since the North Atlantic was the route that ammunition, fuel, food and troops had to travel in order to reach Britain from America.

Harry Hinsley, a member of the small, tight-knit team that battled against Naval Enigma, and who later became the official historian of British intelligence, underlined the significance of the U-boat defeat.

Any delay in the timing of the invasion, even a delay of less than a year, would have put Hitler in a stronger position to withstand the Allied assault, Hinsley points out.

The fortification of the French coastline would have been even more formidable, huge Panzer Armies would have been moved into place ready to push the invaders back into the sea - or, if that failed, then to prevent them from crossing the Rhine into Germany - and large numbers of rocket-propelled V2 missiles would have been raining down on southern England, wreaking havoc at the ports and airfields tasked to support the invading troops.

In the actual course of events, it took the Allied armies a year to fight their way from the French coast to Berlin; but in a scenario in which the invasion was delayed, giving Hitler more time to prepare his defences, the struggle to reach Berlin might have taken twice as long. At a conservative estimate, each year of the fighting in Europe brought on average about seven million deaths, so the significance of Turing's contribution can be roughly quantified in terms of the number of additional lives that might have been lost if he had not achieved what he did.

If U-boat Enigma had not been broken, and the war had continued for another two to three years, a further 14 to 21 million people might have been killed. Of course, even in a counterfactual scenario in which Turing was not able to break U-boat Enigma, the war might still have ended in because of some other occurrence, also contrary-to-fact, such as the dropping of a nuclear weapon on Berlin. Nevertheless, these colossal numbers of lives do convey a sense of the magnitude of Turing's contribution.

He has also built the Turing Archive for the History of Computing , an extensive online resource. Celebrating Alan Turing's genius. They were wrong. The Brits had broken their first Enigma code as early as the German invasion of Poland and had intercepted virtually every message sent through the occupation of Holland and France. Now, with the German invasion of Russia , the Allies needed to be able to intercept coded messages transmitted on this second, Eastern, front.

The first breakthrough occurred on July 9, regarding German ground-air operations, but various keys would continue to be broken by the Brits over the next year, each conveying information of higher secrecy and priority than the next. These decoded messages were regularly passed to the Soviet High Command regarding German troop movements and planned offensives, and back to London regarding the mass murder of Russian prisoners and Jewish concentration camp victims.

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