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Enigma machine from the exhibition "I numeri", Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Roma.
The Enigma is an electro-mechanical machine invented by the Germans in 1918 and widely used during World War II. It is a device which scrambles a plain text message into a ciphered text. It was used solely to encipher and decipher messages.
It consisted of a keyboard of 26 letters in the pattern of the normal German typewriter, but with no keys for numerals or punctuation. Behind the keyboard was a lampboard made up of 26 small circular windows, each bearing a letter in the same pattern as the keyboard, which could light up one at a time. Behind the lampboard is the scrambler unit consisting of a fixed wheel at each end, and a central space for three rotating wheels. If a key was pressed on the keyboard any other letter could light up, and the sequence would only repeat itself after 16,900 (26x25x26) keyings, when the inner mechanism returned to the same position.
The Poles had broken Enigma in 1932, when the encoding machine was undergoing trials with the German Army. But at the time, the cipher altered only once every few months. With the advent of war, it changed at least once a day, giving 159 million million million possible settings to choose from. The Poles decided to inform the British in July 1939 once they needed help to break Enigma and with invasion of Poland imminent.
A secret base had been set up at Bletchley Park, next to London, to attempt to intercept and break enemy military codes. The code breakers were a group of scientists, mathematicians and chess-masters and worked on various projects (between them the mathematician Alan Turing).
The first operational break into Enigma came around the 23 January 1940, when the team working under Dilly Knox, with the mathematicians John Jeffreys, Peter Twinn and Alan Turing, unravelled the German Army administrative key that became known at Bletchley Park as ‘The Green’. Encouraged by this success, the Codebreakers managed to crack the ‘Red’ key used by the Luftwaffe liaison officers co-ordinating air support for army units. Gordon Welchman, soon to become head of the Army and Air Force section, devised a system whereby his Codebreakers were supported by other staff based in a neighbouring hut, who turned the deciphered messages into intelligence reports.
On Sunday 13th December 1942, Bletchley Park code-breakers finally cracked the cipher.
It has been claimed that as a result of the information gained through this device, hostilities between Germany and the Allied forces were curtailed by two years.
Text adapted from: www.royalnavalmuseum.org/info_sheets_enigma.htm
www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/hist/worldwartwo/enigma....
www.bbc.co.uk/history/topics/enigma
"She gets the job done, she does it with a professionalism and ingenuity most heroes can't match, and then she hisses and snarls again and reminds you she's a bad girl." ~Bruce Wayne, Inside an Enigma
"Why does everybody assume any man who touches me must be greened?" - Poison Ivy, Inside an Enigma catwoman-cattales.com/thetales/inside-an-enigma.htm