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The Enigma Machine
1915, two Dutch Naval officers invented a machine to encrypt messages. This became known as the Enigma machine.
Like other rotor machines, the Enigma machine is a combination of mechanical and electrical subsystems. The mechanical subsystem consists of a keyboard; a set of rotating disks called rotors arranged adjacently along a spindle; and one of various stepping components to turn one or more of the rotors with each key press. -
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THE ENGIMA MACHINE
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The Enigma Machine
1918, Arthur Scherbius, a German businessman, patented the Enigma machine.
Arthur Scherbius was a German electrical engineer who patented an invention for a mechanical cipher machine, later sold as the Enigma machine. Scherbius was born in Frankfurt am Main and his father was a small businessman -
The Enigma Machine
Mid 1920s, mass production of Enigma machine with 30,000 machines being sold to the German military over the next 2 decades. -
The Enigma Machine
The Poles set up a world leading crypt analysis bureau and hired leading mathematicians such as Marian Rejewski. -
The Enigma Machine
Marian Rejewski built his own model of the Enigma machine without having actually seen it. -
The Enigma Machine
In 1931, a German traitor told Rejewski that the Germans routinely changed the daily key indicator setting for the codes.
Marian Adam Rejewski was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who in 1932 solved the plugboard-equipped Enigma machine, the main cipher device used by Germany. -
The Enigma Machine
To find the daily key, Rejewski build 6 replicas of the Enigma machine and connected them. -
The Enigma Machine
The new machine could run through more than 17,000 indicator settings. He called this machine, ‘the bomb’. -
The Engima Machine
The Polish Cipher Bureau first broke Germany's military Enigma ciphers in December 1932. -
The Engima Machine
From 1933 onwards Biuro Szyfrow had been reading German Enigma traffic. As war loomed, Poland in their desperation used the Enigma card to guarantee French and British support. -
The Enigma Machine
From 1938 onwards, additional complexity was repeatedly added to the machines, making the initial decryption techniques increasingly unsuccessful. Nonetheless, the Polish breakthrough represented a vital basis for the later British effort. -
The Enigma Machine
Five weeks before the outbreak of World War II, on 25 July 1939, they presented their Enigma-decryption techniques and equipment to French and British military intelligence in Warsaw. -
The Engima Machine
In the German Army and Air Force Enigma, the reflector was fixed and did not rotate; there were four versions. The original version was marked A, and was replaced by Umkehrwalze B on 1 November 1937. A third version, Umkehrwalze C was used briefly in 1940, possibly by mistake, and was solved by Hut 6. -
The Engima Machine
In 1943, British engineer, Tommy Flowers, created Colossus.
Turing wanted Flowers to build a decoder for the relay-based Bombe machine, which Turing had developed to help decrypt the Germans' Enigma codes. Although the decoder project was abandoned, Turing was impressed with Flowers's work, and in February 1943 introduced him to Max Newman who was leading the effort to automate part of the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. This was a high-level German cipher generated by a teletypewriter. -
The Engima Machine
The fourth version of the engima machine, first observed on 2 January 1944, had a rewireable reflector, called Umkehrwalze D, allowing the Enigma operator to alter the connections as part of the key settings.
