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Theeccentric Engineer by Justin Pollard

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Theeccentric Engineer by Justin Pollard 106 TIME OUT COLUMNIST The name of Tommy Flowers deserves to be as well known as the computing industry giants who profited from his wartime efforts. TheEccentric Engineer by Justin Pollard PEOPLE Competition purpose machine, it was the first electronic computer. THE FORGOTTEN What are these Bletchley The device set to work on Park Wrens thinking as they Tunny intercepts. It also gained ENGINEER OF work on Colossus? The best a new name, thought up by BLETCHLEY PARK caption emailed to the members of the Women’s [email protected] by Royal Naval who operated the 23 March wins a pair of one-tonne, room-sized behemoth books from Haynes. – Colossus. A 2,400-valve version entered service four days before D-Day, providing crucial decrypts of Tunny messages in the lead-up to the invasion. It’s said system offering five trillion that Eisenhower had a Tunny times more combinations decrypt, courtesy of Colossus, than the 157 trillion offered in his hand as he gave the order by Enigma. The possibility to launch Operation Overlord. of getting bombes to crunch By the end of the war there that many permutations fast were ten Colossus machines at enough for the intelligence to Bletchley. After the surrender of have any value seemed remote. Germany, eight of them were The man charged with solving destroyed and the other two this conundrum was Max secretly moved to the peacetime Newman, whose ‘Hut F’ team was government intelligence centre, assigned the task of cracking the GCHQ, where one remained in ‘Tunny’ intercepts known to operation until 1960. Flowers was THIS IS MY 50th column for E&T classes in electrical engineering emanate from the German High given £1,000 compensation, much and I’d like to use it to give a at the University of London. At Command. He suggested that less than he had personally spent hooray to one of my engineering the age of 21 he approached the high-speed machinery might on developing Colossus, and was heroes who, sadly, rarely seems General Post Office, a booming help crunch the data by sent back to the Post Office with a to get much recognition. business just coming to terms comparing messages. And who reminder that he could never talk Working at Bletchley Park with the problem of how to better to build such machines about what he had done. * during the Second World War switch between thousands of than the electrical engineers of CAPTION PRIZES was not a good way to become telephone calls. the Post Office? famous. The work was of the It was a problem that intrigued So Flowers set to work on these BAG A BOOK! utmost secrecy and everyone Flowers and in 1930 he moved early machines, called ‘Heath signed the Official Secrets Act, to the GPO research station Robinsons’, named after the so it’s perhaps not surprising at Dollis Hill to work on it. By English cartoonist famous for that so little of what went on the outbreak of the war, he drawing impossibly complicated there ever leaked out. In recent was convinced that an entirely devices. Flowers suggested that, years there has at least been electrical system was possible provided it was left undisturbed, some recognition given to the using valve technology and, he could build a machine in genius of Alan Turing, one of in 1942, this idea brought him which electronic valves stored the finest mathematical minds to the attention of the secret the data for processing. of the century, whose work wartime code and cipher The response was generally This month’s at Bletchley opened the door school at Bletchley Park. skeptical, as it was assumed that competition winner will onto the modern world and The codebreakers there had fragile valves could never take receive copies of the ‘Star who was, in turn, rewarded by been using electromechanical the strain of being ‘always on’. Wars Millennium Falcon his country with persecution devices, known as ‘bombes’, Flowers was therefore left to Owners’ Workshop Manual’ that drove him to suicide. developed by Turing to help devise and develop his system. and the ‘Routemaster Bus But there was another figure crunch through the huge He started in February 1943, Enthusiasts’ Manual’, two new vital to the development of the numbers of combinations needed working at a blistering pace, and titles from the ever-expanding early computer at Bletchley who for cracking German codes. his first machine was ready on range of Haynes Manuals never really received recognition These proved highly effective at 8 December. For eight hours the (haynes.co.uk). Winner of our for what must go down as one of attacking the Morse code Enigma 1,500 thyratron valves performed January 2012 the most astonishing jobs of messages used by much of the faultlessly. The establishment issue compe- practical electrical engineering. German military, but had hit was duly impressed, but Turing tition is Thomas ‘Tommy’ Flowers was something of a brick wall when it himself was amazed. He realised Michael Kueh not a public schoolboy but the came to breaking another group that this was not simply an with ‘Mark son of a bricklayer with a love for of even more important codes. electromechanical calculator; my words: engineering. This led him to take Since 1942 the German High its capacity to store data made it “I came, I an apprenticeship in mechanical Command had been using a new something entirely new. While saw, she engineering at the Royal Arsenal teletype code machine called it could not store a program conquered”’. GETTY IMAGES GETTY in Woolwich, as well as night the Lorenz SZ42, a bespoke internally, nor was it a general- Engineering & Technology March 2012 www.EandTmagazine.com C2201_R8643_Columns_106.BK.indd 106 15/02/2012 16:13.
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