Before Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, there was Alan Turing who is widely considered to be
the father of modern computers.
His greatest contribution was cracking coded German messages that helped the Allies win
World War Two.
Yet he would later be betrayed by the country he protected.
Turing was born on June 23, 1912, in a nursing home in Maida Vale, an affluent district in
central London.
His father Julius was a civil servant who was posted to India.
His mother Ethel was the daughter of the chief engineer of the Madras Railway.
They wanted their children, Alan and his brother John, raised in England, so they returned
home.
In primary school, the headmistress quickly saw Turing’s potential, saying she has “had
clever boys and hardworking boys, but Alan is a genius.”
At the age of 13, he was packed off to boarding school.
On his first day, had to ride his bike 60 miles (97 km) to get to Sherborne School in southwest England
because of a public transport strike.
He demonstrated impressive athletic ability for much of his life.
His best marathon time was 2 hours and 46 minutes which doesn’t look great by today’s
standards but at the time, it nearly qualified him for the Olympics.
An injury would put a stop to that dream.
His calling would lie in mathematics.
At school, some of his teachers were not impressed.
On his report card for his second last year at Sherborne, his English teacher noted: “Reading weak.
Essays show ideas but are more grandiose than pointed.”
Despite the less-than-stellar performance in some subjects, he showed brilliance in
the ones he loved.
Before leaving boarding school, he had grasped the most complicated works of Newton and Einstein,
forcing the headmaster to acknowledge that his young scholar was: “A gifted & distinguished
boy, whose future career we shall watch with much interest.”
Turing shared his interest in math and science with Christopher Morcom, a fellow student
at Sherborne.
A deep friendship developed; Morcom has been described as Turing’s ‘first love.’
Though the feeling was not reciprocated.
Morcom died unexpectedly while in his teens from bovine tuberculosis, which he had contracted
from drinking tainted milk.
Turing was overcome by sorrow.
He was determined, however, to continue his own journey to Cambridge University, writing
to Morcom’s mother, “I know I must put as much energy if not as much interest into
my work, as if he were alive, because that is what he would like me to do.”
Turing was awarded first-class honors in mathematics.
He was elected a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge soon after.
And then he made the journey to the U.S. for a Ph.D. at Princeton.
In 1936, at the age of 23, he published his epoch paper on the Turing Machine,
a mathematical model that described a device that could solve any problem, performing
any task for which a program could be written.
Turing had, in effect, conceived the world’s first computer.
While at Princeton, he went on to build the first stages of an electro-mechanical
Binary Multiplier - a machine for multiplying binary numbers that may have sparked his interest
in cryptology.
At the time, he would have no idea how important this would be in defeating the forces
of evil.
Hitler’s stormtroopers were settling into the Rhineland - an area along the Rhine river
in Western Germany that was supposed to remain demilitarized according to the Treaty of Versailles
that ended World War One.
The reoccupation would be the beginning of the path to all-out war three years later.
In 1938, when he returned to his fellowship at Cambridge University, he was recruited
to join the Government Code and Cypher School part-time.
And when war broke out the following year, Turing moved over full-time to the organization’s
headquarters at Bletchley Park - a sprawling estate north of London.
It was here that he focused on cracking the infamous Enigma code used by Nazi Germany’s
military to send secret messages.
Everything from weather reports to strategic information.
The Enigma looked like a typewriter.
It substituted one letter for another to encrypt a message.
A letter coming into the rotor and coming out would look different.
The clever thing about it is that there were 103 sextillion possible combinations!
Historian and wartime codebreaker Asa Briggs wrote: “You needed exceptional talent, you
needed genius at Bletchley, and Turing’s was that genius.”
Polish mathematicians had already figured out how to read the messages before their
country was invaded in 1939 and shared the information with the Allies.
But at the outbreak of war, the Germans began to change the settings on the machine every
midnight Berlin time which made it all but impossible to decipher the thousands of messages
sent every day.
Turing and fellow codebreaker Gordon Welchman developed a machine called “The Bombe”
that was designed to discover which settings Enigma used to scramble messages.
It replicated the action of several Enigma machines wired together.
Each of the rapidly rotating drums simulated the action of an Enigma rotor.
The Bombe managed to crack Enigma.
Bletchley Park became a code-breaking factory.
200 Bombes cracked messages sometimes within an hour or two of it being transmitted by
the Nazis.
Or even within minutes.
As early as 1943, Turing’s machines cracked 84,000 messages a month or a staggering message
every two minutes.
He then turned his attention to the more complex naval enigmas.
This work was crucial.
German U-Boats - submarines - were hunting down so many Allied ships in the Atlantic
that prime minister Winston Churchill feared that the UK would starve of food, raw materials,
and war supplies.
Thankfully, Turing headed a team that managed to decode the naval signals by 1941 so that
Allied ships could better avoid these coordinated submarine attacks.
If Turing failed to crack the Enigma code, the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944 - D-day -
would have been delayed by at least a year.
Hitler could have strengthened his coastal defences by then to withstand the Allied assault.
Yet there was still more work to be done.
The Germans had an even more sophisticated cipher machine.
The Lorenz was personally used by Hitler and his top generals to communicate the most high-level
messages.
Lorenz had more wheels than Enigma.
The pattern was far more complex.
Turing developed a code-breaking technique called “Turingery” that fed into work
by others including Captain Jerry Roberts to crack the uncrackable Lorenz.
And by the end of the war, Turing also developed a device that allowed people to
speak securely over the phone or the radio by scrambling their voices.
Delilah was years ahead of its time.
It was portable unlike the secure phone system connecting 10 Downing Street and the White
House that was so large it had to be installed in the basement of a department store on London’s
Oxford street.
Some historians estimate that the work at Bletchley shortened the war by at least two
years and saved at least 14 million lives if not many millions more.
And without it, the outcome of the war could have been very different.
One might expect the United Kingdom to have been grateful.
However, Turing’s work was top secret.
He had to sign the Official Secrets Act which prohibited him from disclosing anything about
his time at Bletchley Park.
Wartime information wouldn’t be declassified until the seventies.
So while Turing was awarded an Order of the British Empire Medal at the end of the conflict,
there was no public acknowledgment of his contribution to the war effort.
Many people learned of it for the first time when the Oscar-winning film The Imitation
Game was released in 2014.
After the war, Turing took up a post at the University of Manchester focused on creating
the first functioning British computers.
He was also among the first to conceive of artificial intelligence.
He had an idea that computers would become so powerful that they would think.
He devised the Turing Test, also called the imitation game, as a way of determining whether
a computer can think like a person.
An observer questions a human and a computer.
And has to decide which is the human and which is the computer.
If the computer can engage in a conversation with a human without being detected as a machine,
it is deemed to have demonstrated human intelligence.
A computer program is said to have passed the Turing test in 2014 by simulating a 13-year-old
Ukrainian boy.
In 1951, Turing received the UK's highest scientific award when he was elected a fellow
of the Royal Society, the national science academy.
However, his elation was short-lived.
A year later, he was convicted of homosexual acts.
He had reported a burglary to police but changed details of his story to cover up his relationship
with a 19-year-old man who confessed to knowing the culprit.
He later admitted to the relationship and was convicted of ‘gross indecency’.
Homosexuality was a criminal offense at the time.
Turing didn’t want to go to jail so he agreed to chemical castration - a hormone treatment
that was supposed to suppress his sexual desires.
A decade earlier, he withdrew his marriage proposal to cryptanalyst Joan Clarke who also worked
on Enigma after explaining his sexuality which came as no surprise to her.
Ironically, because he now had a criminal record, he was prohibited from ever working
for the British government’s postwar codebreaking centre.
He was shut out of the field that he helped revolutionize.
Two years later, in 1954, Turing was poisoned by cyanide.
He was 41 years old.
A half-eaten Apple lay by his bedside when he died.
The speculation is that he bit into the apple laced with the deadly chemical, however, the
coroner never tested it for cyanide.
The official verdict was suicide.
It has been noted that the evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning.
On September 10, 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown publicly apologized for Turing’s treatment.
He said, “…on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s
work, I am very proud to say: we’re sorry.
You deserved so much better.”
And in 2017, the UK Parliament passed the “Alan Turing” law which wiped out the
criminal records of 49,000 men convicted of same-sex offences.
Today, thanks to Alan Turing, we live in a world where information - including this video
- can be transmitted with just a click of a button.
His work also made a myth about Apple’s logo take hold.
That it must surely pay homage to Alan Turing.
The man who designed the artwork, Rob Janoff, denied it.
And, before his own death in 2011, Steve Jobs himself said: “It isn’t true, but God,
we wish it were.”
Turing helped kickstart the computer age that has made it possible for you and me to access
any information we like - including online classes, which brings me to the sponsor of
this video.
Skillshare is like the Netflix of educational videos.
It’s an online learning community where you can get access to thousands of classes.
You can learn how to edit videos, how to make great thumbnails, how to take better photos.
There’s literally a class for wherever your interests lie.
All the classes are broken up into short sections, there are no tests, and it’s great for both
beginners and those who want a refresher.
The first 1,000 people to use my link in the description will get a 1 month free trial of Skillshare
which is also a way of supporting my channel.
Thanks for watching.
For Newsthink, I’m Cindy Pom.