In post-world war one Europe, secrecy between nations became paranoid. The growth of international commerce created a need for companies to keep their secrets from competitors. In this era, a German engineer, Arthur Scherbius created the Enigma machine as a means of keeping the business, diplomatic and military conversations secret.
It worked by generating an electric current when a letter key is pressed. It had several moving mechanical gears. When a key is pressed, these moving gears twisted the path of the current, so there will be a different product letter every time a key is pressed. Nazi took the advantage of this complicated design of enigma machine.
When the Second-world war started, the Enigma machine became the most effective and
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powerful code making weapon of World war II. It was so effective, even if the enemy gets their hands on the machine there would be so many complications and possibilities. It was nearly impossible to decipher the encoded message in realistic time. It was a device that turned readable messages into unreadable messages. Providing the enigma machine with unknown set of wheels, the enemy had to consider that this machine can be set up in one hundred and eighty-six million-million-million ways. At the peak of war, German operators changed the setting every day. The replaced the rotors in specified order by using rings and the patch power cables that linked every letter to a different letter. These variable rotor setting made the Enigma encryption virtually impossible to frequency analysis. The Germans thought that their Enigma code is so well encrypted that no one has time or mathematical power to break through the millions of combinations. The encoded message was created by typing the plain German text in Enigma machine. So, from one side plain German was punched and from the other side some gibberish came out that no one understood. Eventually, this gibberish was transmitted through Morse code. As the Second-World War started in September 19, 1939, Nazi coded messages flooded the radio airwaves. At the same time, British Military Intelligence was setting up the most secret place in war time, in Bletchley Park. This Bletchley Park station was later called Station-X. That place was the only hope that the Nazi Enigma code can be decrypted. Bletchley Park was staffed by most intelligent Mathematicians and cryptologists. And the most prominent name in those Mathematicians was Alan Mathison Turing. Alan Turing was one of the founding fathers of modern day computing and artificial intelligence. He was under extreme stress to create a solution to decrypt the Nazi Enigma code by either Mathematical or Mechanical. They made many attempts to break the code every day, but they didn’t have adequate time to break it. Every night, the Nazis changed the setting of the Enigma machine, so no one can break their code and all the work that Alan’s team put in went in vain. By 1940, America aid sent to Europe was being sunk by German U-Boats.
In these attacks thousands of tons of allied ships containing food and clothing were sunk in North-Atlantic. Europe was turning fast towards food shortage and death. The U-Boats were receiving their instructions via Enigma coded radio transmissions. These instructions were created by intelligence gathered by Nazi Spy planes which flew above the North Atlantic and send their locations and possible co-ordinates in Atlantic. Consequently, Nazis send fleets of U-Boats which sank huge amounts of food rations and supplies. If this Enigma code was cracked the allied forces can pin point the locations of the Nazi U-boat fleets in North Atlantic and could change the course of the ships or could’ve bombarded the U-Boats even before they can attack the …show more content…
aid. Turing started to develop a machine, as he knew that Enigma is a machine and only a machine can defeat it. First, Turing started to eliminate the possible settings that Nazi officers used, he also shortlisted the settings that the Nazis regularly used. He opted out thousands of settings. He found a major flaw that every time a letter is pressed a different letter lights up at the displays board, but the letter pressed will never lights up. As a result, this gave him some words which are repeated in some messages and he made his machine to look for those words in the encrypted messages. After more they figured out that Nazi U-Boats send weather report everyday at 6’o clock in the morning and they use “Hail Hitler”, at the end of their message.
Alan Turing set up his machine in such way that it will look for the letter that Nazis are using to encrypt the phrase “Hail Hitler”. And by using the settings Alan Turing broke the Enigma code in less then 20 minutes by using his machine which he named “The Bomb Machine”.
By using this Bomb Machine, Turing and his co-workers were breaking the Enigma code around the clock. As sun rises, the Enigma setting were changed so do Turing’s Bomb Machine settings too. Every day they decoded hundreds and thousand of codes of Nazi Air Force and Navy. By taking the concept of Turing’s Bomb Machine, more decryption machines were created.
By 1945, they created more than Three-Hundred Bomb Machines. Which they set up on both sides of Atlantic Ocean to defeat Hitler’s Nazi Army. Day by day they Nazis were getting beaten in air, land and sea. By intercepting and decrypting the Nazi Enigma Coded messages, allied forces changed the out come of many events of
war. Allied forces changed the out come of D-Day, El Alamein and many other attacks. Without the code breaker of Bletchley Park, the war would be longer, and more lives would be lost. It was Mr. Alan Turing and his co-workers who decrypted the Enigma code, so the allied forces were always one step ahead in the war. But, unfortunately Heroes always suffer the most. Mr. Turing was homosexual, and at that time homosexuality was considered a as crime. As the officials knew that he is homosexual, he lost his job as a cryptologist and offered either prison or hormone treatment therapy. Mr. Turing was left with no choice but to take the hormone therapy. It effected Mr. Turing’s health very badly and in June 1954 he ate a cyanide laced apple and took his life. What a desperately sad end to the life of a Genius. In September 2009, fifty-five years after Turing’s death; the British Government made a public apology to Alan Turing. Britain kept the secret of decryption of Enigma for many decades. But his work help shortened the war by two years and saved millions of lives. Also, his work was used in many fields in computing. The modern-day computer is also a form of Turing’s machine. It works on same principles and laws as the Turing’s Bomb Machine worked.
In World War II, many new weapons were created to kill more people with more efficiency. The most notable of these was the atomic bomb. As American troops closed in on Japan at the end of the war, they realized that taking the small island nation would be nearly impossible. The Japanese soldiers had shown their willingness to die for their country when kamikaze pilots flew into American ships.... ...
The sender would type the message in plaintext (not encrypted) and the letters would be illuminated on a glass screen. With the press of each typewriter key the rotor would shift 1/26 of a revolution giving each letter a different encryption each time, which made the code so difficult to crack. Due to the complexity of the code the enigma became very useful for the Germans for radioing messages to u-boats. The cipher was finally broken when the British were able to capture some key documents from a German warship.
WWII, one of the bloodiest wars in history. The Germans and the Axis Powers were combating the English and US with the other Allied Powers. From 1939-1945 war raged on in Europe and in the Pacific. In 1939 proposals were made (not approved until later) by the Nazi’s to create two of the most destructive and advanced weapons of the time (Gatland). Thus, the V-1 and V-2 rockets were put into production. The V-1 and V-2 rockets were important to the German’s because they believed that these weapons would give them an extreme advantage in the war, and eventually help them win the war. The development of these rockets were very important to the Nazi’s. These rockets were different and more advanced than any other bomb made before. Also, the developments of these rockets have had long term effects after the war. The V-1 and V-2 were intricate and powerful, making a recipe for destruction.
More important, the Allies needed to come up with an effective strategy. Organizing their cargo ships into convoys, or groups for mutual protection was the Allies plan of action. Air patrols helped protect convoys by covering much of their routes (Pitt 129). This strategy caused problems because with all the ships in a convoy, the U-boats could sink them much easier and more at a time. “Wolf Packs,” a group of U-boats which was the new strategy that Hitler developed to help in the attack of the Allies convoy. With this tactic the Germans would attack the Allied ships in different directions using se...
The idea of the phonograph came from the man who invented the light bulb. Thomas Alva Edison is one of the greatest inventors of all time decided to create this invention. In 1877, Edison was working on a machine that would decipher telegraphic messages to paper tape. He used a diaphragm with an embossing point. This would be held onto a moving paraffin paper. Thus when spoken into it, the vibrations made indentations on it.
In 1939, British Intelligence recruit Alan Turning, a mathematician/crypt analyst from Cambridge, to help win the war against the Germans. Turing leads a team of linguists and scholars to crack the "unbreakable" Nazi codes, shaped by the Enigma machine, which is used to communicate with the German military. Alan constructs a machine that would decrypt Enigmas messages at a much more substantial rate, rather than mentally solving the codes on paper. While the team finds success, Turing's announces his confined homosexuality to his newly married wife/colleague. Although there are violent and alcoholic actions illustrated and sexual themes portrayed throughout, this movie has a very strong message on perseverance and is suitable for high school age kids.
These projects come to live in the Research division at IBM. In 2005 Paul Horn, director of the division wanted to try to create a machine able to pass the Turing Test. No machine had done it. But researchers didn’t believe that it would get the public’s attention in the way that Deep Blue had. Horn thought of another game where it would...
In the war between countries, technology has played a huge part in the outcome; this is especially evident during the time of World War II. Technology in warfare consisted of weapons, vehicles, aircrafts, and chemical reactants. Technology during World War I was lacking and countries knew when World War II began that in order for them to be victorious they must have the most technologically advanced weapons and other devices or systems that would benefit the nation. The Allies were victorious in WW2 because they made better use of the available technologies than the Germans, advancing in communication/detection systems such as sonar and the radio, as well as, weapons including the atomic bomb, and bomber aircrafts.
Alan Turing was born June 23, 1912 in London, England. He was a bright child, often times misunderstood by his teachers while in grade school. He grew interested in mathematics while attending Sherborne School, which would be a driving force for him the rest of his life. His adult academic studies included getting an undergrad degree in mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and his Ph.D. of mathematical logic at Princeton University. His mathematical mind allowed him to have many amazing accomplishments in his lifetime; becoming the father of the modern day fields of computer science, artificial intelligence, and artificial life. His ideas in these fields didn’t have a huge impact in his lifetime; however his efforts to help the allied
World War II Encryption - The Enigma Machine The Enigma machine is an advanced electro-mechanical cipher machine invented by a German, Arthur Scherbius, at the end of World War I. Its only function was to encrypt and decrypt messages. It was used by all of the branches of the German military as the main device to secure wireless communications until the end of World War II.
The enigma code was first broken in 1933 by Polish mathematician and cryptologist Marian Rejewski, with the help of his two fellow colleagues Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Rózyki. While studying at Poznań University in 1929, Rejewski began attending a cryptology course held by the Polish General Staff ’s Cipher Bureau which was only available to the university’s most advanced mathematics students.
The idea of computing began at the start of civilization. The computer’s long history makes it, “… one of the most interesting and important machines ever invented” (Anonymous). Computers are simply complex counting devices. The abacus was an ancient computer which used beads to solve math problems. The abacus was strictly manual and the desire for an automated machine grew. One of the earliest automated machines was invented in the nineteenth century when French weaver, Joseph Jacquard, created a loom that could be programmed. Large hole punched cards were used by the loom to create geometric patterns. Aside from producing beautiful patterns, the punched cards were later modified to become the main form of computer input. The system of punch cards led to the first successful semi-automated computer, a punch-card tabulating machine invented during the 1880s by American Herman Hollerith. It was used to tabulate the results of the U.S. census. Each punch card contained the data of each individual. Operators fed the countless cards into the computer. When the spring-mounted nails of the computer passed through the holes of the punch-card, an electric circuit was completed. As seen in diagram C, the results of each card were displayed on rows of dials. Hollerith’s company, the Tabulating Machine Company, was eventually sold and was renamed the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in 1911, which still exists today. The first electronic computers were very large and elaborate machines that required a lot of money to build and use. The entire computer industry might never have taken off without government funding. World War II created a need for the U.S. military to calculate missile trajectories quickly, so Dr. John Machly was hired by the military to build a machine for this task.
The electronic computer is a relatively modern invention; the first fully operable computer was developed about 50 years ago, at the end of World War II, by a team at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Engineering. This team was headed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, who named the new machine ENIAC, for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator. ENIAC was hardly a personal computer, occupying a large room and weighing about 33 tons. By today's standards, ENIAC was extremely slow, unreliable, and expensive to operate. In 1945, on the other hand, it was considered a marvel.
1910 marked one of the most important times in the history of the computer with the invention of the first electrical automatic computing machine, the Z1, designed by Konrad Zuse in Germany. Finally after three hundred years there was an advance worth writing home about, but the German government had no time for such things as WW1 began to rage through Europe, so sadly Zuse’s machine was also never completed. Nevertheless the idea had caught on, and the true father of digital computing, Alan Turing, developed the Colossus, a machine which could decipher code. Alan went on to write essays on the subject of artificial intelligence and began a revolution the likes of which would change the world. Turing’s works are still referred to by computer scientists today.
The computer was first thought up by a guy named Alan Turing who figured there could be a machine that could do mathematical equations without human interaction. Without the technology available, this thought was just that, a thought. However, in the 1930’s IBM built a calculating machine called the Mark I. Although still not quite a computer because it had to read punch cards, it would set the stage for the future.