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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."
The notes will be restored and then popped into a glass display case with one or two pages visible, with a sort-of description of why they are important.
Pretty much all of Bletchley is like this, unfortunately. Stuff on display that you are not going to understand, such as copies of Turing's early mathematical papers with only the first page showing.
The problem with the whole Bletchley Park experience is that it was obviously extremely important, but is practically beyond all explanation for the ordinary punter. I think I might be able to intellectually struggle through an explanation of some of it, but the displays do not explain it in enough detail to help with that. Overall, my visit felt like a patchwork of different explanations of the same few concepts using poster boards, audio devices and video and interactive displays. It's padded out with various "wartime experience" bits here and there.
It probably seems like a very negative attitude, but a technical chap in his mid-forties with a couple of bright teenagers in tow ought to be right in the target demographic for Bletchley, but I'm practically embarrassed to say that I ended up drinking weak hot chocolate in the cafe and agreeing with my boys that it was all rather dull.
Special commendation for the rack of old bicycles at the end of one of the huts, with a hidden speaker to give you the authentic experience of what squeaky bicycle wheels sounded like in the 1940's. Or something?
Just to be clear, people in military establishments like Bletchley Park did wipe their arses on discarded papers, and such places often used earth closets for the people working in the huts. Only the big-wigs in the main house would have been able to use its WCs. Even confidential papers were used, because it was assumed that no-one would have the stomach to read them afterwards.
That is the origin of the word (in English English at least) "bumf" for paperwork - bum fodder.
Of course, spies did salvage the used bumf and read it, so the practice of taking a handful of paper from the wastepaper basket with you to the latrines was banned after a while. Presumably by then it had also been used as roof insulation, but that had been forgotten.
Any documents and hardware from the 1940's was also seen as a security risk. Why tell the world how the UK had won ww2 by reading German Red, Tunny material in realtime?
Churchill ordered all material at Bletchley to be destroyed (both paperwork and hardware like several Colossus computers) not primarily because of the security risk. It was highly unlikely that any other foe would use the same encryption method as the Germans had.
It was because Churchill did not want the credit for winning the war to go to a handful of boffins rather than to the armed forces. This was for reasons of public morale; hundreds of thousands had died in combat and air raids, and everyone had lived in austerity for years. He did not want people to think that all that sacrifice had been pointless because in the end the war had really been won by "some university-type egghead smart-arses using dirty tricks" - because that is how the majority of the public would have seen it.
If you doubt how that is how most people would have seen it in 1950, just fast-forward and think of how most people see the activities of the NSA today.
Visited the National Cryptologic Museum (on the same campus as the NSA, just off 295 in Maryland) about a decade ago. I and my then-girlfriend were probably the only visitors in the entire building, and the staff were pretty excited to see us. They even let us try out the German Enigma machine they had on display - no glass display case at that time! Don't know if it's changed in the last ten years, though.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Tommy Flowers, .... was a British engineer. During World War II, Flowers designed Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, to help solve encrypted German messages.
Funny, I was going to mention Tommy Flowers in a post above. I find it a bit odd that people today have focussed on Turing as the hero of that time; I cannot help wondering if it's because of the gay angle. As you say, Flowers built the first computer than can be called modern - electronic, programmable, general purpose. Yet hardly anyone has ever heard of him.
At the time Bletchley Park seemed to be divided into two "camps" and Flowers was up against some influential opponents. One described Colossus as "a waste of good valves".
Flowers even put some of his own money into building the first Colossus (there were several), for which he was never fully re-imbursed, although after the war he did get a small award. What a far cry from the billions made by Jobs, Wang, Gates & co two generations later. Churchill's order to destroy the Bletchley Park paperwork and hardware left a near vacuum in the history of computing - there are many people today who even think Bill Gates invented computers, FFS.