Bletchley Park is a property on the edge of Milton Keynes which was the home of an ultra-secret British code breaking organisation during World War II. Alan Turing was probably the most famous person associated with this place, and his story was turned into the film "The Imitation Game" (2014) starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Today they have recreated much of the original setup of Bletchley Park and turned it into a tourist attraction, including modern displays about encryption and protecting your personal data online and the like.
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| Bletchley House, the original grand house, viewed across the lake. |
The Germans used an "Enigma" machine to encrypt all their communications. The machine itself was fairly well known and had been used before the war. The problem was that it could encode messages in over a billion different ways, so the British needed to work out what settings were being used each day. Even after they learned to break the code they had to keep doing it again every day, because every day the Germans changed the code.
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| The German Enigma machine, thousands of which were used by the Germans to encrypt messages. |
The British secret weapon was the "Bombe" machine they developed, which was sort of primitive computer which could run through a huge number of possible combinations in a short time. The one pictured here is a faithful replica built from scratch over 13 years, finishing in 2009. All the originals were destroyed to maintain secrecy after the war.
This replica is a fully operational one, and they run it every 15 minutes every day to demonstrate it to visitors. All these wheels spin, at various speeds, until the machine detects a possible solution to the day's code. It may have to be run numerous times before the correct answer is found, but it massively reduces the number of combinations which have to be checked by hand. It is much more entertaining to watch than a modern computer!
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| The British "Bombe" machine, which helped break the Enigma codes. |
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| Around the back of the machine, some of the whirring cogs and shafts. Also an elaborate oiling system! |
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| Some of the relays which trip to capture the correct solution. |
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| The top wheels spin twice per second; the second row step once in 13 seconds, and the last row once in 5 minutes. |
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| A man warned us there had been a "pecking incident" yesterday - keep a safe distance! |
It was very pleasant looking around the park and gardens, and through the main house. It seemed quite well run, and they are working to raise money and restore more of the 1940's buildings.
