Britian’s Best Kept Secret Bletchley Park Chantal Livesay Aug 4th, 2016 MA Interactive Design
Professor David Meyers 5403 Media History and Theory Essay 02
Bletchley Park Location Bletchley Park is located in Buckinghamshire, England. Now the building serves as a heritage attraction that is open during the week for anyone to come in and tour, but before it was a tourist attraction, Bletchley Park was the central site for Britain’s codebreakers during World War II. Bletchley Park is located opposite the Bletchley railway station in Buckinghamshire. Which is located 50 miles northwest of London.
Bletchley Park History Brown Willis built the mansion in 1711, it was first known as Bletchley Park after it was purchased Samuel Lipscomb Seckham in 1877. The 581-acre estate was then bought by Sir Herbert Samuel Leon in 1883. In 1938 Bletchley Park was bought by Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair. Who, at the time, was head of the Secret Intelligence Service (Now called MI6), had plans to use the estate for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) in the event of war. Since the neighboring railway station had a line that met with the main West Cost line, this was a key advantage seen by Sinclair and his colleagues. The lines connected Bletchley Park to universes like Oxford and Cambridge, which would supply many of their code-breakers. Called Captain Riley’s Shooting Party, Sinclair and his colleagues, would set the scene for one of the most memorable stories of World War II and one of its best-kept secrets.
World War II In 1939 World Ward II began. The mission of Sinclair and Bletchley Park was to crack the Nazi codes and ciphers in order to find out what was going on with the Axis Powers. The most famous cipher system was broken at Bletchley Park. Before the start of World War II in 1932 the Poles had broken the Enigma coding machine that was undergoing trials with the German Army. Before it was broken the cipher would alternate only once every few months, after it was changed at least once a day. This produced a 159 million million million possible settings to choose from. The Poles informed the British in 1939 that they needed help to break the Enigma.
Enigma Machine The Enigma machines were part of a series of electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines that were developed to protect commercial, diplomatic and military communications. It was originally invented by Arthur Scherbius at the end of World Was I. Back at Bletchley Park on January 23rd, 1940 the first operational break in the Enigma came when the team working under Dilly Knox, which consisted of John Jefferys, Peter Twinn, and Alan Turning, were able to unravel the German Army Administrative Key. This later became known at the Park as “The Green.” This breakthrough encouraged other codebreakers to crack the next code, “The Red” which was used by Luftwaffe Liaison officers who were coordinating air support for Army Units. During the breaking of the codes, Gordon Welchman devised a system for his codebreakers to turn deciphered messages into intelligence reports, he shared with his codebreakers and others in neighboring huts in Bletchley Park. Mystery surrounded the fact that Enigma had been broken. To keep this information hidden, the reports were given the appearance of coming from an MI6 spy called Boniface. This created an imaginary network of agents inside Germany.
Hut 8 While at Bletchley Park, Turing was assigned to Hut 8. He and his team were trying to break the German Enigma codes. When the Enigma machines became ineffective after the Poles were able to crack the codes in 1932, Turing and his team began working on creating a more sophisticated machine, called “the bombe” that would be able to decipher the improved Enigma messages. By 1940 Turing’s team had two operating bombes that were able to break 178 coded messages. At the end of the war, they had created close to two hundred. Even though Turing’s bombe was a turning point for computer technology, it helped paved the way for Colossus. When the Germans started coding important messages the need for Colossus grew. Commands from Hilter and his high command were coded with an electronic digital machine that used a binary system and twelve code wheels of unequal size. This improvement caused Turing’s bombe machines to become ineffective. (Isaacson, 2014)
Colossus But deciphering codes that were ever changing required an upgrade in equipment for the forces at Bletchley Park. During the war in the year 1943, a computer known as Colossus was also being built at Bletchley Park. Colossus was the first all-electric, partially programmable computer. Although for nearly three decades, no one from outside knew about Colossus. It was kept hidden for many years after the end of the war. Colossus was geared for a special task, unlike a general purpose (or “Turing-complete�). But similar to those computers, Colossus did have Alan Turing’s personal fingerprints on it. When Turing arrived at Princeton in 1936, he became focusing on codes and cryptology. With the possibility of war with Germany looming over his head, Turing was even more interested in cryptology and was interested in finding out how to make money from it.
Colossus In Hut 11 Max Newman had run into a problem. They needed to build a machine that would help decode encrypted messages. Even though Turing was not part of Newman’s team he did come up with the idea of a statistical approach that would detect any departures from a uniform distribution of characters in a stream of ciphered text, (“Turingery”). A machine was built that could scan two loops of punched paper tapes. It used photoelectric heads in order to compare all the possible versions of the two sequences. This was dubbed the “Heath Robinson.” This was also a predecessor machine to the Colossus and helped build the machine into what history remembers. In 1943 the Colossus Mark 1 was operational. By 1944 the Colossus Mark 2 was functional and worked even better than it predecessor. It used 2,400 vacuum tubes, making it bigger than its predecessor. By D-Day, ten Colossus computers were in use. From 1938-1945 Bletchley Park served its purpose during the Second World War. In early 1945 there were at least 10,000 personnel working at Bletchley and its outstations. (Bletchley Park, n.d.) Bletchley Park played an important part in the innovation of computers. With the breaking of the Enigma codes and the creation of the Colossus computer, innovators were able to take a giant leap forward with computers.
Work Cited Bletchley Park. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bletchley_Park#CITEREFHinsley1996 Enigma machine. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine HISTORY OF BLETCHLEY PARK. (n.d.). Retrieved from Blethley Park: https://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/hist/ Isaacson, W. (2014). The Innovators. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks. Keith Lockstone (n.d.). The Influence of ULTRA in the Second World War [Recorded by S. H. Hinsley]. Babbage Lecture Theatre.