Hello, everyone!
My name is James,
and I work for The Enigma Project,
and I'm here to show you something special today.
I'm here to show you this thing over here,
which is a genuine
World War II Enigma Machine.
Now this is not a copy.
It's not a replica.
This was actually used
during the Second World War.
This was made in 1936,
and it was found
in France
after the war.
Now you don't get many of these about today.
And there are about maybe 12,
maybe 20 in museums.
The ones in museums are behind glass cases.
You can't really get close to them.
So this is quite a rare thing we're going to have a look at today.
So let's take a look inside.
[morse code sounds]
OK, what we see inside is something--well,
to me, it looks a lot like an old-fashioned typewriter,
but instead of paper,
we've got a lamp board at the top.
Let's see how this works.
I'm going to press a letter.
Let's press the letter K.
If I press the letter K--
there we go, the letter W
lights up, and that's your code.
But the clever thing about Enigma is
if I press K again,
a different letter lights up.
In this case,
the letter M.
Why is that?
Let's have a look at what's going on inside.
OK, inside we've got these three things at the top.
These are called rotors.
Now, inside the rotors you have to imagine
it's all like spaghetti.
It's crisscrossed wiring.
Now, that crisscrossed wiring
scrambles up the alphabet.
It scrambles up the alphabet, and it makes a code.
But, watch what happens when I press a letter.
When I press a letter,
the rotors
move.
Now, it's this moving part
that changes the code.
Like I said,
inside the rotor
it's crisscrossed wires.
So the wires are moving inside the machine,
which means it scrambles up the alphabet
in a different way, each time you press a letter.
Now in the morning,
they would have to set up
this Enigma machine.
Let me show you how they did that.
First thing they would have to do
is set up this thing at the front.
It's called the plug board.
And what we've got here
are ten wires,
and it connects twenty letters of the alphabet
into ten pairs.
And two letters in a pair
get swapped over.
That's the first level of scrambling.
Like I said before,
inside these rotors
it's all crisscrossed wires.
So the message gets scrambled again,
and again, and again.
It comes back, and it lights up one of these bulbs.
Now, these rotors come out--
they swap about.
In fact, they had five rotors to choose from,
so they would pick three
from a box of five.
They would put them in the machine,
in any order.
Each rotor has 26 starting positions,
and there is also something called
a kick-over point,
which means that when this rotor
on the right-hand side
has done a full revolution,
and gone all the way around,
it kicks the middle rotor.
And the same--when the middle rotor
has gone all the way around
it kicks the left-hand rotor one place.
Now, this is no good if we can't decode a message.
So let's see how they did that.
I'm going to send something simple.
I'm just going to say "OK."
So, I'm OK.
If I send the message "OK,"
let's see what happens.
First of all,
O
becomes an M.
And K
becomes L.
OK, now we're going to reset
this machine back to where it started.
This rotor has moved.
It's moved two places.
I'm going to move it backwards.
One---two places.
Now the machine is reset
back to where it started.
Now if I type in the code M-L,
let's see.
M
becomes O.
And L
becomes K.
OK. You get the message back again.
This is a code and decode machine.
It's brilliant!
It's just very clever engineering.
And that's all from me for now.
So if you have been,
thanks for watching.
[morse code sounds]