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Alan Turing's Notes Found After Being Used As Insulation At Bletchley Park
An anonymous reader writes: In 2013, a restoration project for Hut 6 of Bletchley Park uncovered a collection of papers being used as roof insulation. The papers were frozen to preserve them while they were inspected and repaired. Now they're on display at an exhibition showing items found during the restoration process. "The documents also included the only known examples of Banbury sheets, a technique devised by [Turing] to accelerate the process of decrypting Nazi messages. No other examples have ever been found. All the findings are unique as all documentary evidence from the codebreaking process was supposed to be destroyed under wartime security rules."
"Alan Turing's notes" is somewhat overselling it. They're not talking about a white paper: Bletchley would have produced hundreds of sheets of these kind of scrap workings every day, so they were genuinely worthless then. They're only worth anything now because all of the rest were destroyed. To put it in perspective, they're more valuable to us than a shopping list from that era would be, but less valuable than a shopping list from ancient Sumeria would be.