Turing Welshman bombe at the Heroes of the Bombe story When and where to see the Bombe Alan Turing was a leading young The Bombe is housed at The National Museum of Cambridge University mathematician Computing. when he was recruited to work as a codebreaker. After he was told about Volunteer guides are available to explain and the Poles’ success against Enigma, he demonstrate in more detail how the Bombe works. realised that if you could guess some For safety reasons, access to the gallery has to be part of a message, known as a “crib”, limited when maintenance is being carried out, he could design a machine to search for potential normally on Mondays. Enigma key settings. He called the machine the “Bombe”, similar to the name (Bomba) used by Group and corporate visits can be arranged. Turing-Welchman the Poles in an earlier attempt to decrypt Enigma Contact
[email protected] for details. messages. Unfortunately Turing's original design Bombe needed many 'loops' in a menu to avoid far too many Fancy becoming a codebreaker? Exclusive invalid stops. This made it difficult to find a viable Masterclasses are available, subject to availability. menu, and the original Bombe would not have Please contact
[email protected] or call us on sufficient throughput for the codebreakers' needs. 01908 374708. Gordon Welchman was also a Details of museum events can be found on: mathematician and codebreaker www.tnmoc.org/events who worked on Enigma. He spotted that the Enigma had a weakness which could be used to eliminate most of the Bombe’s possible but irrelevant key settings.