Allied Code Breakers Spawned Our Digital Age

Journalist Price (The Pixar Touch) delivers a solid history of how Allied codebreakers at Bletchley Park developed “the first operational digital computers” to defeat Germany’s vaunted Lorenz SZ cipher machines. Crediting Bletchley Park’s successes to a “strain of meritocracy [that] existed, even if only on the margins, within a powerful system of social class,” Price notes that the British signals intelligence agency initially thought the “right type of recruit[s]” for cryptography were academics who had experience with art history, law, German, and the classics. However, it was mathematician Alan Turing who cracked the Enigma codes, and mathematician Max Newman and telephone engineer Tommy Flowers (a self-taught specialist in “large-scale digital electronics”) who designed and built Colossus, a programmable computer that allowed British codebreakers “to read the Third Reich’s highest-level military communications system, including messages from Hitler himself.”