#19 Bletchley Park

The first line shows the famous Enigma cipher machine that the Germans used to encrypt messages during WWII. Next to it are Alan Turing and the Bombe decipher machine. The Bombe is an electro-mechanical device used by the British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages during World War II.

The second line shows its less famous, nonetheless, perhaps much more important cousin, the Tunny cipher machine and Tommy Flowers. (It was officially called Lorenz Cipher but the British codebreakers named it Tunny.) It operated in a similar way to the Enigma Machine, but the Lorenz was far more complicated, and it provided the Bletchley codebreakers with an even greater challenge. In 1943 Newman came up with a way to mechanise the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher and therefore to speed up the search for wheel settings.

Colossus, the first large-scale electronic computer, which went into operation in 1944 at Britain’s wartime code-breaking headquarters at Bletchley Park.