Who first cracked the Enigma code?
['Mastermind' theme]
Was it the Poles?
Top man! Absolutely right.
[APPLAUSE]
There's a general feeling that we did all the work
but in fact it was a Pole in 1932, as early as that,
who first cracked how an Enigma machine worked.
But in the late 1930's the Germans changed the way they worked
so that, I think it was something like, 364 billion possible settings each day
to the daily code.
Now that's not something you could guess.
But the first one to crack it in the beginning to see how it worked
was a young Polish mathematician called Marian Rejewski
and if you ever go to Bletchley Park,
and I do urge you to do so,
there is a splendid statue to him and-
Have they got a good shop there?
They have a very nice shop there,
they also have a Museum of Computing which I know will excite you-
Oh, indeed.
Indeed, I can-
Already moist.
[laughter]
I mean, it is well established that the work on Enigma
did do a great deal to hasten the end of the war.
Eisenhower estimated that it shortened the war by two years,
which is hundreds of thousands of lives.
So it was an extraordinarily important thing that these boffins got together,
but how do you think they were first brought together, at Bletchley Park?
What was the first move the government made to assemble the boffins?
Singles club.
It was almost, it was almost that,
it was a Telegraph crossword competition,
especially fiendish Telegraph crossword,
and the winners were sent letters saying
"You might be our kind of chap."
But anyway,
they then soon became aware that
having people who knew that
"carthorse" was an anagram of "orchestra"
was not going to win them the war.
They needed really great mathematical minds-
It's when the world changed, isn't it?
-it'll be fascinating conundrums that the Nazis will set us!
We'll have to find clues and follow them!
No, you just need a supercomputer.
But fortunately, there was a man ready for it.
It just happened to be that history had thrown up a quite brilliant mathematician called Alan Turing
who was at Cambridge at the time
There he is; he's considered the father of computing.
One of the truly great men of his time.
And you may remember Gordon Brown making an impassioned, but far too late apology
on behalf of the British government for his terrible death.
He was persecuted for his homosexuality and chemically castrated and then committed suicide
by eating a poisoned apple.
And there are many to this day who believe that Apple Computers named their apple with the bite out of it
in honour of Alan Turing, the father of computing.
And I was in a position to ask one of the founders, Steve Jobs, and he said, er,
"It isn't true... but, God, we wish it were." It's just a coincidence,
but they're very proud that people think it might be because he was simply an extraordinary man.
But the real fiendish thing was not Enigma, it was called Lorenz
and for Lorenz was used between German high command and Hitler himself, basically.
And Lorenz was un-be-liev-ably difficult.
And for that, Turing and his team built what really was the world's first computer. It was called Colossus.
And it was way ahead of its time, it was quite extraordinary.
It was all a complete, sort of, national secret until...
Totally
very recently, wasn't it, or not quite recently.
Absolutely. There is Bletchley Park.
And it is open to the public. I'm a big advocate for it, so I make no apology for banging its drum. It's a great place.
It's an interesting choice that we took as a nation, though, you know, during the Second World War,
which was an expensive experience for us, and left us bankrupt,
but out of it we had, basically, invented the computer, and we decided to make it a secret.
Yes. [laughter]
Or in any sense attempted to monetise it.
Well, actually we gave the secret of the Colossus to the CIA.
Oh, superb.
Yeah.
[laughter]
It was an excellent move. No-one will be needing that.
But there's a great, there's a great memo, because there were a lot of people in the British government
who thought "What are these people in faintly damp tweed, with pipes and glasses, doing,
writing on bits of paper here, and with quite a big budget, I mean, what are they doing?"
And Churchill had a look round, and a fellow explained to him what they were doing
and there's a very famous memo in Churchill's hand that just says
"Give them what they want."
Fantastic that, isn't it?
Well, can I just ask, and you may not be able to answer this, but what was the nature of the Enigma code?
Was it mathematical, or...
Yes. I mean, don't ask me to give precise details, I'm really no expert,
but it was a purely physical, mechanical device but it had so many different rotors
that had so many different angles and positions that there were hundreds of billions of permutations
and it was our job was to intercept, or work out what the code word of the day was
and then we could translate the messages. It was all very odd.
But they were very lazy. It relied on Germans making mistakes, by using the names of their dogs and things.
So a lot of intelligence was gathered about the people in naval intelligence in particular
about what their dogs, their girlfriends, their addresses and things like that,
because it's a bit like passwords, you know...
I'm beginning to think that people will be able to hack into my John Lewis account now.
[laughter]
Not named after your dog, surely?
It's ironic that they invented a computer and it finished the war early,
but the cyber war being waged by China will be the death of all of us.
Yeah, there is some, you know, the worry about it is, I mean, I was speaking to a man at Los Alamos,
which is where they developed the nuclear bomb, and obviously the science now goes in other directions...
They said they had something like a million attacks an hour
on their, sort of, cyber front-end security.
And I said "Wh... Hackers?", and they said "No, no. Nations. Well, let's be honest, one nation."
And I was interviewing him on camera, and I said "Would it rhyme with Bina?"
[laughter]
And he said "It might well do."
And I said "That's how many times they're battering on the doors of your security?"
And he said "Oh yeah".
They must have been there, they've got thousands of computers...
Absolutely.
...trying to work it out 24 hours a day.
I know. And presumably we're attempting in our own befuddled way to do the same.
We've got a ZX80 on it.
[laughter]
Except when Wimbledon's on.
[laughter]
Yeah, we've got a crow that can get a tiny bucket out of a perspex tube.
[laughter]
Take that, China!