Theeccentric Engineer by Justin Pollard

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

Theeccentric Engineer by Justin Pollard

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