The history of the Enigma starts around 1915, with the invention of the rotor-based cipher machine. As usual in history, the rotor machine was invented more or less simultaneously in different parts of the world. In 1917 there were inventions from Edward Hebern in the USA, Arvid Damm in Sweden, Hugo Koch in The Netherlands and Arthur Scherbius in Germany [1].
Invention of the Rotor Machine (1915)
There is one development however, that pre-dates the others, and that is the invention of Theo A van Hengel (1875-1939) and RPC Sprengler (1875-1955), two Dutch naval officers who produced working rotor-based cipher machines for the Dutch War Department (Ministerie van Oorlog) in 1915. This fact was discovered in 2003 and is described in detail in a paper by Karl de Leeuw [2].
Officially though, the Enigma machine was invented by Arthur Scherbius in 1918, right at the end of World War I. After several years of improving his invention, the first machine saw the light of day in 1923. A year earlier he had secured the rights to patent NL10700 of Dutch inventor Hugo Koch for a similar device [4].
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