The most famous of the group
that broke the German Enigma machine codes
was Alan Turing.
He was one of those people
who seem to be one step ahead of the rest of us
in the fields of math and science.
He and the team at Bletchley Park,
a top secret center dedicated to codebreaking during the war,
helped turn the tide of the conflict
by decrypting the Nazi’s most difficult codes.
Turing was born in 1912, the second of 2 brothers.
As a young man, Turing was incredibly intelligent, and athletically gifted.
He rode his bike everywhere.
He rode 60 miles to his boarding school on his first day,
stuck far away by a train strike.
He made it on time.
The school didn’t always recognize Turing’s talents.
He was almost stopped from taking the school certificate
due to concerns that he would fail.
While he excelled in science, his headmaster said
"If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, he is wasting his time at a Public School.”
In 1928 Turing met a new classmate called Christopher Morcom.
The 2 young men became very close friends.
They would also explore intellectual problems in physics and maths together.
They would be seen passing notes to each other during class.
The 2 boys were very close and at this time
Alan supposedly developed a crush on Christopher.
Their friendship was not to last though
as in 1930 when Alan was 17 years old,
Christopher died of tuberculosis.
After his friend’s death Alan threw himself into trying
to unravel the nature of consciousness
and how it was linked to matter.
This led Alan to think about the concept of the mind
as a machine that could be recreated with mathematical logic.
Turing attended Kings College, Cambridge
He received a distinguished degree in 1934 and a Fellowship of King's College in 1935
He attended Princeton University for a couple of years
returning to England just prior to the war.
As war broke out in Europe in 1939, Turing went to work
for the British Cryptanalytic Headquarters at Bletchley Park.
The people at Bletchley Park, worked 24 hours a day
to break a variety of German codes and give the Allies prior knowledge of German intentions
to be used on the battlefields, skies and oceans and “see” inside the German Reich
to try to understand the workings of the murderous regime.
At Bletchley, Turing was known to be somewhat eccentric.
He would ride to work in a gas mask to protect him from pollen.
His bike had a bad chain, and instead of replacing it,
he kept time in his head, counting out the pedal rotations it would take
before it fell off – then repairing it before it did.
He would also chain his mug to a radiator
to avoid it getting taken by someone else.
In “Hut 8”, Turing who was always referred to as “Prof”
and his team elaborated upon the early computer designed by Poles
working to break the German Enigma machine codes.
With this work and Turing's ability to see patterns and equations,
the team in Hut 8 began to break additional German codes,
most famously, the U-boat codes, which ordered the German submarine fleet
towards their victims and hunting grounds.
As the war progressed, and the cyphers became more complex,
Turing and the team at Bletchley invented more complicated machines
to rapidly decrypt the German communications.
At it’s peak Bletchley was decrypting 84,000 communications each month.
After WWII, Winston Churchill called the submarine threat
the only thing that really scared him during the war.
Though many worked on this problem and others, without Alan Turing,
the solution to the problem might have taken much longer
(time which the allies did not have), or may not have even happened at all.
His work undoubtedly shortened the war and saved many lives.
It also laid the groundwork for the technological age we live in today.
For his work during the war, Turing was awarded
the Order of the British Empire by the King,
but this, like his work, remained secret for years.
Turing was gay, and in the decades before its “de-criminalization” in 1967,
homosexuality was persecuted and prosecuted in England as well as many other nations.
After WWII, and as the Cold War began to “heat” up,
Turing was arrested for “gross indecency".
Taking a guilty plea, Turing was offered prison or conditional probation.
He took probation.
As a condition of the probation
he had to take large doses of “hormone therapy".
The aim was to render him physically incapable of having sex,
and the treatment had terrible side-effects on his health and wellbeing.
After his conviction, he was barred from doing any further government work
and his security clearance was revoked.
His past was subject to investigation, as the authorities were worried
that his homosexuality could have been used as blackmail by the Soviet Union.
No evidence of which has ever been found.
On June 8th, 1952, Turing's housekeeper found his body.
A half eaten apple which was never checked for poison
and a “To Do” list was by his bedside.
The official cause of death was suicide
though many have cast doubt upon this conclusion.
In the years following his death,
Turing’s work became more and more recognized by the public
and a groundswell of support to rectify the injustice of Turing’s life came to the fore.
In 2009 after intense lobbying the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
made an apology for the treatment of Turing but he was not officially pardoned.
The UK justice minister said that a pardon was “not considered appropriate
as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence".
In 2012 many influential people including Stephen Hawking
lobbied the UK government to officially pardon Turing.
In 2013 The Queen gave Turing a Royal pardon.
The prime minister David Cameron said:
"His action saved countless lives.
He also left a remarkable national legacy
through his substantial scientific achievements,
often being referred to as the father of modern computing."
Stephen Fry, said at the time:
“At bloody last. Next step a banknote if there’s any justice!”
In 2014, the movie “The Imitation Game” starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley
was released, depicting Turing's struggles,
and lending impetus to a new realization of his genius and knowledge of his persecution.
In June, 2019, the British government announced
that Turing's likeness would be placed on the £50 note.
A small comfort to those who knew and supported Turing.
The note contains an appropriately enigmatic quote from Turing.
“This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be.”