Raphael Kessler

Bletchley Park is small estate in Milton Keynes where during the second world war, the most sophisticated code breaking took place. The engineering, analysis, dedication and perseverance involved in deciphering the German codes was on an impressive scale. This involved mathmatical and practical genius in understanding and deconstructing the systems in order that they could be decoded.

Once the Enigma code was broken, the Bombe was constructed that enabled each day's new code keys to be found and therefore German messages to be read each day, typically these were cracked before midday each day. As the code breakers had Enigma machines to analyse and use, this made that process simpler.

Despite the Germans believing up until the end of that war and beyond that the Enigma codes were safe and unbroken, the German High Command demanded an even more sophisicated encyphring machine, which was known as Lorenz, for communication from and between the senior echelons. This was a much more complex device and the Allies did not obtain one of those until after the war had ended. In an almost impossible leap of engineering, the people at Bletchley Park managed to reverse engineer the machine based on the traffic that it generated. This was then used to create Colossus which was able to decript the codes sent my the Lorenz machines.

The machines built at Bletchley Park were the first programmable computers and consisted of banks of valves and wiring in place of what would in time be replaced in more sophisicated machines by microchips. Not only did these machines curtail the war by as much as two years (and consequently save the lives of millions of people on all sides), it was also the beginning of the computer age.