The Poles had done stunning work in cracking the Enigma codes, but after Poland fell, British Intelligence inherited the project.
At a country home outside London called Bletchley Park, teams of experts worked on Enigma decryption, including the famous mathematician Alan Turing.
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Opening War Theme
“Prelude and Fugue in D Major” from The Well-Tempered Clavier.
Composed in 1722 by Johann Sebastian Bach. Public domain.
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Closing War Theme
Except when otherwise indicated, the contents of this podcast are © and ℗ 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 by Mark Painter, all rights reserved. Some music and sound effects used by arrangement with Pond 5. Photograph of Alan Turing statue by Antoine Taveneaux, used pursuant to a Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Source.
Fantastic episode!
My favourite story of code breaking during WW2 might just be Arne Beurling who went and sat down with pen and paper for two weeks and figured out how to break the Siemens and Halske T52, enabling the Swedes to read all German communication through the country including that they were going to invade the Soviet Union.
Hi Mark;
I love your podcast.
In this episode #:340, you mentioned that Alan Turing went to AT&T Labs (Murray Hill) and worked with people there to set up a secure telephone link. I believe the key person he met was Claude Shannon. If you don’t know who Claude Shannon was but the Shannon Particle is what is commonly referred to as the “bit”. I hope you will research Mr. Shannon and devote a modicum of discussion of him and his contributions to our digital world and the subject of discrete mathematics. He and Mr. Turing are under appreciated in history. “The Imitation Game” has done a lot to give Mr. Turing some of the recognition he deserves and I hope if you give Mr. Shannon some time maybe there will be a movie giving him some of the recognition he deserves.
Thank you again for all your efforts. I am a fan of history and biographies and know you have devoted a great deal of effort into this labor of love.
Best Regards,
Lawrence Sugarman
A very well written couple of episodes. You can run a popular science podcast after you finish the 20th century.