When you press the letter P on the keyboard, for example, an electrical current passes through the three rotors, each containing a jumble of 26 wires, and then back again to the lamp board, where the letter J might light up. The Enigma accomplishes its complexity with three rotors and a plug board.
"It's a battle which you have to enter every night of the war."īletchley Park, a mansion with large grounds purchased by the British Government to house its codebreaking operation during WWII.
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The number of solutions would take a whole paragraph to write out fully but can be expressed as about 3.3 x 10^114. The machine's innards created an exponentially eye-popping number of possible solutions to a given cipher. Take a hint from his orange tie, which is decorated with schematics of an Enigma's workings. Mechanical complexityĭon't be fooled by Baldwin's understated description of the Enigma's function. Designed to obscure messages sent over wireless, Scherbius tried, more or less unsuccessfully, to sell the machines to businesses and anyone else who might have a need for it until he died in an accident in 1929.Īt that point, the company "is just swallowed up by the German government," Baldwin said, because it needed the technology to help hide its efforts to rearm its military in potential violation of the Treaty of Versailles. One hundred years ago this week, Baldwin told us, German inventor Arthur Scherbius took out a patent for the Enigma machine. In fact, the Enigma is even older than World War II. "It does look rather old-fashioned, does it not, enclosed as it is in an oak case?" Baldwin said.
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Looking at the machine, it's hard to believe it confounded some of the world's best technical experts, who spent years at places like the UK's secret code-breaking compound at Bletchley Park working on ways to crack it. Then they would tap out the encrypted message in Morse code over the radio, sure in the knowledge that only someone with their own Enigma machine with the same exact settings could decipher it. Users would type their messages into the machine and write down each replacement letter as it lit up. If you press one key on the stripped-down keyboard, a different letter lights up in the lamp board, an array of light-up letters arranged just above the keyboard. As Enigma expert Mark Baldwin demonstrated on Wednesday to a crowd of employees at CBS Interactive, CNET's parent company, "it just changes one letter into another." The power of this machine prompted the Allied forces to launch an effort that used machines, mathematicians sworn to secrecy and some Naval derring-do to crack the code and read Germany's messages. That gave Germany's lethal U-boats the power to communicate with each other about attacks on merchant ships, which devastated the UK throughout the war, taking thousands of lives and cutting off vital supplies and troops en route from North America. It was then cutting-edge, creating one of the world's strongest encryption keys.
That marks it as a Nazi cipher machine, used in World War II to encrypt messages sent over radio waves by the German military. It's the black elliptical logo engraved in the wood that sets it apart. It could be just an oddity in an antique store. A black metal mechanical device resembling a typewriter sits in a wooden box.