October 26, 2025 • 24 mins
A quiet country house. A noisy war. And a handful of people who turned logic into a lifeline. We take you inside Bletchley Park to follow the thread from Poland’s algebraic assault on Enigma, through Alan Turing’s audacious vision for the Bombe, to Tommy Flowers’ all‑electronic Colossus that read Germany’s secrets at machine speed. Along the way, you’ll meet Bill Tutte, the young mathematician who reverse‑engineered the Lorenz cipher from ciphertext alone and set the stage for statistical attacks that still echo in modern cryptography.
We map how Ultra and Tunny intelligence shortened the war, steered convoys past U‑boats, and primed the D‑Day invasion with hard facts, not guesses. But the plot deepens with the cost of secrecy: Colossus dismantled, blueprints burned, and careers muted by classification. While ENIAC and others claimed the spotlight, Bletchley’s ideas seeped into everything—stored‑program computers at Manchester and Cambridge, Shannon’s information theory, von Neumann architecture, and the earliest questions that became artificial intelligence. The voices in these huts showed that when information turns into a battlefield, computation becomes survival.
We connect that legacy to today’s cybersecurity. The logic that beat Enigma lives in encryption standards, key exchange, and the machine learning models that scan for anomalies. The teamwork across mathematics, engineering, and linguistics looks a lot like modern incident response. And the ethos—knowledge in service of freedom—remains the standard for responsible tech. If you care about AI, encryption, or the story of how ideas become tools, this journey will sharpen how you think about the devices in your pocket and the systems that guard your data.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_01 (00:28):
And welcome to Technology Camp.
I'm Professor J Ron.
Today the Cold Breakers let mepark in the birth of
monocomputers.
Let's do it.
(01:12):
I'm Professor J.
Rod, and today we're going to dothe Cold Breakers of Bletchley
Park and the birth of moderncomputing.
We're going to journey to theshadow halls where computing was
not yet a career, but a matterof life and death.
This is the story of BletchleyPark, a quiet estate in the
English countryside that becamethe birthplace of modern
(01:33):
computing.
Here, mathematics,mathematicians, and linguists,
chess champions and cross-wordfanatics joined forces to fight
a war of logic, where victorydepended not on bullets, but on
bits.
When information became aweapon, computation became
survival.
The code that couldn't bebroken.
(01:55):
Long before laptops andnetworks, nations fought with
paper, ink, and radio waves.
By the 1930s, the newbattlefield was invisible, the
ether, filled with encryptedtransmission that carried troop
movements and top secretcommands.
Germany led this war of secrecywith a device called the Enigma.
It looked like a typewriter, butinside were spinning rotors that
(02:18):
scrambled each letter intochaos.
Every day the machine settingschanged, creating 150 quin
possible combinations.
To the Allies, the Enigma wasunbreakable.
To a handful of mathematiciansin Poland, it was a challenge.
The first cracks in Enigma camenot from armies, but from
(02:38):
algebra.
The Polish breakthrough.
In 1932, three Polishmathematicians Marian Rajowski,
Jerry Roski, and Henry Ziegskiquietly began studying German
cypher.
Working in secrecy at the PolishCypher Bureau, they used
(03:02):
mathematics rather thanespionage to model the internal
wiring of Enigma.
Rajowski built what he called aBomba Cryptologic Senna, a
machine that can test Enigma'srotor settings automatically.
It was the first mechanicalattempt to outthink a computer
(03:22):
before computers existed.
By 1939, the Polish team hadsolved Enigma, but the war was
closing in.
They shared everything with theBritish and French just weeks
before the German invasion ofPoland.
The spark of modern computationwas lit in Warsaw, then carried
west as Europe burned.
(03:45):
Bleshley Park awakens.
Northwest of London stand aVictorian mansion surrounded by
hedges and quiet gardens,Bletchley Park.
In August of 1939, the Britishgovernment Cold and Cipher
School took over the property.
Within weeks it became the mostsecret workplace on earth.
Cambridge and Oxford recruitsarrived under vague invitations.
(04:09):
You are to assist the War Officein a special duty.
There were no uniforms, onlynicknames and locked huts
numbered instead of named.
Among those arrivals were aquiet mathematician from
Cambridge named Alan Turning.
The mind of Alan Turning.
Alan Matison Turning had alreadychanged mathematics before the
(04:31):
war began.
In 1936, his paper on computablenumbers described a theoretical
device later called the Turningmachine that could execute any
logical instrument given enoughtime and memory.
He had invented, in theory, themodern computer.
At bestly, Turning applied thesame logic to the German enigma.
(04:52):
He realized the only way to beata machine that changed faster
than humans could think was tobuild another machine to
outthink it.
The mind that imagined thecomputer now needed it to save
civilization.
The birth of the bomb.
Turning, along with engineerGordon Welchmann, designed the
bomb, B O M B E, an electricalmechanical monster of rotating
(05:16):
drums that tested thousands ofEnigma possibilities per minute.
Each bomb was taller than a man,lined with spinning cylinders
wired to simulate the Germanmachine boats.
Operators, often women from theGerman Royal Navy service,
loaded plugboards, pressedstart, and listened to the
arhimmatic world of the logicturned into motion.
(05:39):
When the bomb stopped, itrevealed a possible key, the
day's configuration.
Analysis then compared it toknown German phrases like Hail
Hitler, weather reports, routinewords to confirm our match.
Within months, Bletchley's teamwas reading German messages
faster than they couldtranslate.
(06:00):
Each rotation of the bomb was aheartbeat of reason in the chaos
of war.
The Hidden Army.
They came from every background.
Debutants, students,secretaries, scientists, each
(06:21):
handed fragmented, each handledfragments, a code group, a
translation, a wiring diagram,never the whole picture.
The secret was absolute.
Letters home said nothing.
Parents believed their daughterswere filling were filing papers
somewhere in the countryside.
Only decades later did the worldlearned what they accomplished.
(06:42):
History remembers the heroeswith medals.
Computing began with those whokept quiet.
The impact of intelligence.
The decrypted Enigma machine,codenamed Ultra, gave the Allies
the upper hand in the Battle ofthe Atlantic.
They could now track U-boats,reroute convoys, and predict
attacks before they happened.
Historians estimate Ultrashortened the war by two years
(07:05):
and saved millions of lives.
But it was another outcome, oneinvisible at the time.
The race to break codes hadturned into the first race to
build computers.
War didn't just invent newweapons, it invented new ways to
think.
And that's uh next we willcontinue with Blessed Be Park
(07:33):
and the birth of moderncomputing.
But across the channel, a newcipher machine appeared, one
even more complex, moredangerous, and designed to
outproduce every alliedanalysis.
This is the story of Colossus,the first true electronic
(07:54):
computer born from necessity,built in secret, and almost
erased from history.
Sometimes inventions hide behindclassifications, waiting decades
to be recognized as revolution.
The Lorenz Challenge.
In 1941, Germany needed a ciphermore secure than Enigma for its
highest level communications.
(08:14):
Hitler's orders, OKW's strategicplans, and messages to field
marshals.
They turned to a new machinecalled the Lorenz SZ40, later
the SZ-42.
Unlike Enigma's keyboards androtors, Lorenz used teleprinter
signals, the ones and zeros ofthe bolt code to encrypt text
(08:35):
over radio teletype links.
To the Allies, it was a ghost inthe airwaves, faster, more
mathematical, and utterlyimpenetrable.
But so often in history, luckand human error opens a crack.
In August 1941, a Germanoperator sent the same message
twice using the same Lorentz keysettings, a fatal mistake.
(08:57):
The messages were intercepted atthe Y station at Q and forward a
new team of mathematicalanalysis in North London, known
as the Tesseri and the Numeri.
One repeated message can exposean empire's secrets.
At the centre of this new battlewas a young mathematician named
Bill Tuttle.
He had no military training,just a brilliant mind for
(09:20):
patterns.
Working only from interceptedciphertext without ever seeing a
Lorenz machine, Tuttlereverse-engineered its entire
logical structure.
He discovered that the Lorenzused 12 wheels to generate a
complex pattern of bits thatwere XOR with the plaintext, a
process that would later definedigital encryption.
(09:42):
Toto's analysis was the map wasa mathematical miracle, but
solving by hand took weeks.
The war moved in days.
To keep up, the analysis neededa machine faster than any
electromechanical bomb,something that could test
thousands of logical conditionsper second.
Breastwick's next leap will benot mechanical, it would be
(10:04):
electronic.
Enter Thomas Tommy Flowers, anengineer from the General Post
Office Research Station atDallas Hills.
Flowers was an expert intelephone switching system,
machines that use vacuum tubesto route calls faster than
relays.
When he heard about the Lorenzproblem, Flowers proposed a
(10:24):
radical idea.
Build an entirely electroniccomputer using thermatic valves,
tubes that can switch atthousands of times per second.
His supervisor laughed.
Valves were unreliable.
No one believed they can build amachine with 2,000 of them, but
Flowers knew if it kept poweredcontinuously, the valves would
(10:44):
be stable.
He went ahead anyway, fundingmuch of the prototype himself.
By 1943, Colossus Mark I wasready.
It stood seven feet tall andweighed a ton and used 2,500
tubes.
When switched on, paper taperaced through its readers at
5,000 characters per second.
(11:05):
Electronic logic circuits testedeach possible wheel pattern and
printed probable keys to ateleprompter.
Every pulse of a Colossus was abinary heartbeat of modern
computation.
Speed as a weapon.
Colossus arrived at BenchleyPark in January 1944.
(11:26):
Its impact was immediate.
Colossus solved a Lorenz messagein hours.
It could run statistical testson 5,000 characters per second,
blinding speed for its time.
By June 1944, ten Colossus wereoperational.
The intelligence they producedwere codenamed Tunney.
(11:46):
Tunney decrypts revealed thedisposition of German forces
before D-Day.
Commanders knew where thePanzers divisions waited, how
many troops guarded Canalisversus Normandy.
Beyond the largest invasion inhistory stood an array of
machines no one could admitexisted.
(12:31):
Inside Blessley's wooden halts,the atmosphere was both ordinary
and intense.
Operators worked in eight-hourshifts, feeding tapes, checking
printouts, listening for thenext crucial message.
They couldn't talk about whatthey did.
Not to family, not to friends,not for decades.
Alan Turney moving betweenprojects from enigma to speech
(12:53):
encryption to mathematicalresearch that would later define
AI.
Tommy Flowers maintained hismachines like living creatures,
coaxing them to run day andnight without failure.
The hum of colossus became thesoundtrack to victory.
In a war of steel and fire,these were the quietest battles
ever fought.
(13:13):
Secrecy and silence.
When the war ended in 1945, thecolossus was dismantled.
Blue pits were burned, operatorswere sworn to silence under the
Official Secrets Act.
Even as the post-war computingflourished with ENAC in America
and EdSAC in Cambridge, the truefirst electronic computer
(13:35):
remained a classified secret.
Alan Turning received no publiccredit.
Tommy Flowers returned to hispost office, his contribution
buried by secrecy.
Progress without recognition isa sacrifice too few remember.
Rediscovery.
Decades later, in the 1970s, ascomputing historians traced
(13:58):
their discipline's roots, thetruth finally emerged.
Former codebreakers began tospeak.
Documents were declassified.
Tommy Flowers was recognized asthe engineer who built the first
programmable electronic digitalcomputer.
At Bretchley Park, a full-scalereconstruction of Colossus Mark
(14:18):
II was later completed in 2007,a whirling-clicking tribute to
the machine that helped win thewar and ignite the computer age.
Some inventions don't justchange the future, they create
the language of it.
When the bombs start spinningand the classes fell silent, the
(14:40):
world moved on.
But the ideas born at BledleyPark did not die with the war.
They were seated in secret labs,universities, and the minds of
those who've seen what machinescan do.
This is a story of how coalbreakers laid the foundations
for everything we callcomputing.
When the machines went quiet,their logic kept thinking in the
(15:00):
minds of those who built them.
The victory over Nazi Germanywas complete, but Blessy Park
remained a secret until the 70s.
For decades, his staff cannotspeak of what was done.
Alan Turning returned toacademic work at Manchester
University, Tommy Flowers to thepost office.
No honors, no publications, nofanfare, just silence.
(15:21):
And yet, beneath that silence,history was shifting.
Turning now imagined machinesthat could think.
Flowers vacuum tubes inspiredesigners at Cambridge and
Princeton to push electronicsfurther.
Claude Shannon in Americapublished his 1948 paper on
information theory using thesame binary logic Turning had
(15:42):
envisioned a decade earlier.
The end of one war became thebeginning of another, the war
for understanding informationitself.
At Manchester in 1948, Turninghelped build one of the first
stored program computers, but hewasn't content with speed or
storage.
He wanted to know if themachines can learn.
His 1950 essay, Computing,Machinery and Intelligence,
(16:06):
asked a simple question.
Can machine think?
He proposed a test, theimitation game, to see if a
machine response could beindistinguishable from humans.
The test became the basis formodern artificial intelligence.
Turning had already taughtmachines to calculate.
Now he wanted he wanted them tohe wanted to teach them to
(16:29):
understand.
But his country did not rewardhis brilliance.
In 1952, Turning was prosecutedfor homosexuality, then a crime
in Britain.
He lost his security clearance,his career, and tragically, his
life two years later.
It took 60 years for the Britishgovernment to apologize, and
(16:50):
nearly 70 for a royal pardon.
Yet his legacy never neededpermission.
It was already running in everymachine that could follow a
logic path.
He built a future that outlivedthe prejudice of his present.
From Codebreakers to Computing.
The idea conceived at Bresleyspread quickly after the war.
(17:11):
In Cambridge, Maurice Wilkinsbuilt the ESAC in 1949, the
first stored program computer toperform useful calculations.
In America, John von Newmanproposed a new architect,
instructions and data stored inthe same memory, the model every
computer still uses today.
Behind each blueprint was theghost of Bletchley, switches,
(17:33):
relays, and logic gates thatcould remember, compare, and
decide.
The difference between a ciphermachine and a computer was only
a matter of purpose.
As peace settled, that purposechanged, from decoding messages
to solving scientific problems,then to running businesses and
government.
By the 1950s, machines oncebuilt for war were calculating
(17:57):
ballistics, bank ledgers, andeven the path of planets.
Humanity has created a tool forreason itself.
Tommy Flower and the LostEngineer.
When Turning's name faded intoacademic footnotes, Tommy
Flowers continued workingquietly on the communication
systems.
His electronic switching methodsbecame the foundation for
(18:17):
post-war telephone andeventually computer circuit
design.
But for decades his achievement,colossus, remained classified.
He could not list it on a resumeor claim interventions and
patents.
Others built upon his workwithout knowing his name.
When his story finally surfacedin the 70s, Fisher has a Flowers
(18:38):
has already retired.
Reporters asked how it felt tobuild the first computer had
never been credited.
He smiled and said, I did itsjob.
That was enough.
The measure of innovation isn'trecognition, it's results.
Bleshley Park Reborn.
By the 1990s, historians andvolunteers fought to save
(19:00):
Bleshley Park from demolitions.
They succeeded.
Today the site is a museum andheritage center, home to the
reconstructed Colossus Mark II.
Visitors stand in awe as papertape flies through its reader
and lights blink across itspanels.
Children see it not as anartifact of war, but as
ancestors of their laptops andphones.
(19:23):
Every modern microchip is adescendant of those rotors and
valves spinning in a countryhouse.
Legacy in logic.
From Blessed Cobreakers camethree legacies.
First, the technology,electronic computing, binary
logic, and automation.
Second, the methods, teamworkacross discipline, mathematics,
(19:47):
engineer, linguistics.
And the third, the ethos, thebelief that knowledge itself can
defend freedom.
These principles will shapeeverything from NASA mission
control to the internet age.
When machines learn to serve us,it's the human who must stay
ethical.
From codebreakers tocybersecurity.
(20:08):
In a sense, we're all bledlynow.
Every encrypted email, everypassword, every cyber attack we
defend carries the DNA of theirwork.
The mathematics of Turning andTuttle live in RSA encryption,
block ciphers, and machinelearning models.
The logic that once defeatedEnigma now protects bank
(20:30):
accounts and nations.
The war for information neverended.
It just moved online.
Bletchley Park was a secret for30 years, yet its echoes last
for centuries.
From Turney's logic to FlowersEngineering, from mathematicians
to the thousands of women whokept the machines running, they
(20:50):
did more than win a war.
They provided the intelligence,human or machine, is the most
powerful, it's most powerfulwhen it serves a moral purpose.
Perhaps the greatest code theyever wrote was the one that
remains unbroken.
The example of courage andreason in time of fear.
(21:11):
And I hope that, you know, wewe've seen the story, we've all
seen, you know, if we are our ITguys, we've seen that imitation
game and we've seen what thegovernment did with Alan
Turning, but it's a you know, itshows that it was at that time.
This is one of the reasons whythey called the greatest
(21:31):
generation, is because of thesacrifices and the commitment
that they met, that theydedicated themselves in order to
defeat the Nazis.
Right?
They they did whatever it tookto win the war.
And I'm afraid that sense ofsocial responsibility and
patriotism may not exist today,you know, because times have
(21:56):
changed.
But back then, they they didwhat they had to do.
And, you know, I tip my hat offto them.
And you know, if it wasn't forthem, we wouldn't have a job.
Like I wouldn't have a job,right?
Teaching cybersecurity if itwasn't for them.
So, yeah, I'm extremely gratefulto them.
And and, you know, obviouslythey help us win the war, you
know, which is was a great oneof the greatest accomplishments
(22:20):
that they made.
But to not to have your workacknowledged, that must have
been a killer.
That must have hurt.
That must have stung reallyhard.
Not, you know, because you wantpeople to know, like, hey, I did
this.
But it's good that at least, youknow, Flowers was acknowledged
(22:40):
later on, you know, turning, Imean, this at least his family
maybe got some recognition oracknowledgement that he did what
he had to do, you know,regardless of all the personal
stuff that he had going on, thathe was able to do what he had to
do to win the war for theallies.
So my hat's off to both or andto everyone who served in World
(23:03):
War II and served in theBlessedly Park and all the other
encryptions, uh, you know, allaround as far as allies uh is
concerned.
Alright, and that brings us tothe end of our journey through
the Cold Breakers Blessing Parkand the birth of modern
computing.
I'm Professor J-Rod, and thishas been Technology Tap.
(23:24):
Until next time, stay grounded,stay curious, and as always,
keep tapping into technology.
This has been a presentation ofLittle Cha Cha Productions, art
by Sarah, music by Joe Kim.
We're now part of the Pod MatchNetwork.
You can follow me at TikTok atProfessor J Rod at J R O D, or
(23:47):
you can email me at Professor JRod J R O D at Gmail dot com.
And welcome to Technology Camp.
I'm Professor J Ron.
Today the Cold Breakers let mepark in the birth of
monocomputers.
Let's do it.
(01:12):
I'm Professor J.
Rod, and today we're going to dothe Cold Breakers of Bletchley
Park and the birth of moderncomputing.
We're going to journey to theshadow halls where computing was
not yet a career, but a matterof life and death.
This is the story of BletchleyPark, a quiet estate in the
English countryside that becamethe birthplace of modern
(01:33):
computing.
Here, mathematics,mathematicians, and linguists,
chess champions and cross-wordfanatics joined forces to fight
a war of logic, where victorydepended not on bullets, but on
bits.
When information became aweapon, computation became
survival.
The code that couldn't bebroken.
(01:55):
Long before laptops andnetworks, nations fought with
paper, ink, and radio waves.
By the 1930s, the newbattlefield was invisible, the
ether, filled with encryptedtransmission that carried troop
movements and top secretcommands.
Germany led this war of secrecywith a device called the Enigma.
It looked like a typewriter, butinside were spinning rotors that
(02:18):
scrambled each letter intochaos.
Every day the machine settingschanged, creating 150 quin
possible combinations.
To the Allies, the Enigma wasunbreakable.
To a handful of mathematiciansin Poland, it was a challenge.
The first cracks in Enigma camenot from armies, but from
(02:38):
algebra.
The Polish breakthrough.
In 1932, three Polishmathematicians Marian Rajowski,
Jerry Roski, and Henry Ziegskiquietly began studying German
cypher.
Working in secrecy at the PolishCypher Bureau, they used
(03:02):
mathematics rather thanespionage to model the internal
wiring of Enigma.
Rajowski built what he called aBomba Cryptologic Senna, a
machine that can test Enigma'srotor settings automatically.
It was the first mechanicalattempt to outthink a computer
(03:22):
before computers existed.
By 1939, the Polish team hadsolved Enigma, but the war was
closing in.
They shared everything with theBritish and French just weeks
before the German invasion ofPoland.
The spark of modern computationwas lit in Warsaw, then carried
west as Europe burned.
(03:45):
Bleshley Park awakens.
Northwest of London stand aVictorian mansion surrounded by
hedges and quiet gardens,Bletchley Park.
In August of 1939, the Britishgovernment Cold and Cipher
School took over the property.
Within weeks it became the mostsecret workplace on earth.
Cambridge and Oxford recruitsarrived under vague invitations.
(04:09):
You are to assist the War Officein a special duty.
There were no uniforms, onlynicknames and locked huts
numbered instead of named.
Among those arrivals were aquiet mathematician from
Cambridge named Alan Turning.
The mind of Alan Turning.
Alan Matison Turning had alreadychanged mathematics before the
(04:31):
war began.
In 1936, his paper on computablenumbers described a theoretical
device later called the Turningmachine that could execute any
logical instrument given enoughtime and memory.
He had invented, in theory, themodern computer.
At bestly, Turning applied thesame logic to the German enigma.
(04:52):
He realized the only way to beata machine that changed faster
than humans could think was tobuild another machine to
outthink it.
The mind that imagined thecomputer now needed it to save
civilization.
The birth of the bomb.
Turning, along with engineerGordon Welchmann, designed the
bomb, B O M B E, an electricalmechanical monster of rotating
(05:16):
drums that tested thousands ofEnigma possibilities per minute.
Each bomb was taller than a man,lined with spinning cylinders
wired to simulate the Germanmachine boats.
Operators, often women from theGerman Royal Navy service,
loaded plugboards, pressedstart, and listened to the
arhimmatic world of the logicturned into motion.
(05:39):
When the bomb stopped, itrevealed a possible key, the
day's configuration.
Analysis then compared it toknown German phrases like Hail
Hitler, weather reports, routinewords to confirm our match.
Within months, Bletchley's teamwas reading German messages
faster than they couldtranslate.
(06:00):
Each rotation of the bomb was aheartbeat of reason in the chaos
of war.
The Hidden Army.
They came from every background.
Debutants, students,secretaries, scientists, each
(06:21):
handed fragmented, each handledfragments, a code group, a
translation, a wiring diagram,never the whole picture.
The secret was absolute.
Letters home said nothing.
Parents believed their daughterswere filling were filing papers
somewhere in the countryside.
Only decades later did the worldlearned what they accomplished.
(06:42):
History remembers the heroeswith medals.
Computing began with those whokept quiet.
The impact of intelligence.
The decrypted Enigma machine,codenamed Ultra, gave the Allies
the upper hand in the Battle ofthe Atlantic.
They could now track U-boats,reroute convoys, and predict
attacks before they happened.
Historians estimate Ultrashortened the war by two years
(07:05):
and saved millions of lives.
But it was another outcome, oneinvisible at the time.
The race to break codes hadturned into the first race to
build computers.
War didn't just invent newweapons, it invented new ways to
think.
And that's uh next we willcontinue with Blessed Be Park
(07:33):
and the birth of moderncomputing.
But across the channel, a newcipher machine appeared, one
even more complex, moredangerous, and designed to
outproduce every alliedanalysis.
This is the story of Colossus,the first true electronic
(07:54):
computer born from necessity,built in secret, and almost
erased from history.
Sometimes inventions hide behindclassifications, waiting decades
to be recognized as revolution.
The Lorenz Challenge.
In 1941, Germany needed a ciphermore secure than Enigma for its
highest level communications.
(08:14):
Hitler's orders, OKW's strategicplans, and messages to field
marshals.
They turned to a new machinecalled the Lorenz SZ40, later
the SZ-42.
Unlike Enigma's keyboards androtors, Lorenz used teleprinter
signals, the ones and zeros ofthe bolt code to encrypt text
(08:35):
over radio teletype links.
To the Allies, it was a ghost inthe airwaves, faster, more
mathematical, and utterlyimpenetrable.
But so often in history, luckand human error opens a crack.
In August 1941, a Germanoperator sent the same message
twice using the same Lorentz keysettings, a fatal mistake.
(08:57):
The messages were intercepted atthe Y station at Q and forward a
new team of mathematicalanalysis in North London, known
as the Tesseri and the Numeri.
One repeated message can exposean empire's secrets.
At the centre of this new battlewas a young mathematician named
Bill Tuttle.
He had no military training,just a brilliant mind for
(09:20):
patterns.
Working only from interceptedciphertext without ever seeing a
Lorenz machine, Tuttlereverse-engineered its entire
logical structure.
He discovered that the Lorenzused 12 wheels to generate a
complex pattern of bits thatwere XOR with the plaintext, a
process that would later definedigital encryption.
(09:42):
Toto's analysis was the map wasa mathematical miracle, but
solving by hand took weeks.
The war moved in days.
To keep up, the analysis neededa machine faster than any
electromechanical bomb,something that could test
thousands of logical conditionsper second.
Breastwick's next leap will benot mechanical, it would be
(10:04):
electronic.
Enter Thomas Tommy Flowers, anengineer from the General Post
Office Research Station atDallas Hills.
Flowers was an expert intelephone switching system,
machines that use vacuum tubesto route calls faster than
relays.
When he heard about the Lorenzproblem, Flowers proposed a
(10:24):
radical idea.
Build an entirely electroniccomputer using thermatic valves,
tubes that can switch atthousands of times per second.
His supervisor laughed.
Valves were unreliable.
No one believed they can build amachine with 2,000 of them, but
Flowers knew if it kept poweredcontinuously, the valves would
(10:44):
be stable.
He went ahead anyway, fundingmuch of the prototype himself.
By 1943, Colossus Mark I wasready.
It stood seven feet tall andweighed a ton and used 2,500
tubes.
When switched on, paper taperaced through its readers at
5,000 characters per second.
(11:05):
Electronic logic circuits testedeach possible wheel pattern and
printed probable keys to ateleprompter.
Every pulse of a Colossus was abinary heartbeat of modern
computation.
Speed as a weapon.
Colossus arrived at BenchleyPark in January 1944.
(11:26):
Its impact was immediate.
Colossus solved a Lorenz messagein hours.
It could run statistical testson 5,000 characters per second,
blinding speed for its time.
By June 1944, ten Colossus wereoperational.
The intelligence they producedwere codenamed Tunney.
(11:46):
Tunney decrypts revealed thedisposition of German forces
before D-Day.
Commanders knew where thePanzers divisions waited, how
many troops guarded Canalisversus Normandy.
Beyond the largest invasion inhistory stood an array of
machines no one could admitexisted.
(12:31):
Inside Blessley's wooden halts,the atmosphere was both ordinary
and intense.
Operators worked in eight-hourshifts, feeding tapes, checking
printouts, listening for thenext crucial message.
They couldn't talk about whatthey did.
Not to family, not to friends,not for decades.
Alan Turney moving betweenprojects from enigma to speech
(12:53):
encryption to mathematicalresearch that would later define
AI.
Tommy Flowers maintained hismachines like living creatures,
coaxing them to run day andnight without failure.
The hum of colossus became thesoundtrack to victory.
In a war of steel and fire,these were the quietest battles
ever fought.
(13:13):
Secrecy and silence.
When the war ended in 1945, thecolossus was dismantled.
Blue pits were burned, operatorswere sworn to silence under the
Official Secrets Act.
Even as the post-war computingflourished with ENAC in America
and EdSAC in Cambridge, the truefirst electronic computer
(13:35):
remained a classified secret.
Alan Turning received no publiccredit.
Tommy Flowers returned to hispost office, his contribution
buried by secrecy.
Progress without recognition isa sacrifice too few remember.
Rediscovery.
Decades later, in the 1970s, ascomputing historians traced
(13:58):
their discipline's roots, thetruth finally emerged.
Former codebreakers began tospeak.
Documents were declassified.
Tommy Flowers was recognized asthe engineer who built the first
programmable electronic digitalcomputer.
At Bretchley Park, a full-scalereconstruction of Colossus Mark
(14:18):
II was later completed in 2007,a whirling-clicking tribute to
the machine that helped win thewar and ignite the computer age.
Some inventions don't justchange the future, they create
the language of it.
When the bombs start spinningand the classes fell silent, the
(14:40):
world moved on.
But the ideas born at BledleyPark did not die with the war.
They were seated in secret labs,universities, and the minds of
those who've seen what machinescan do.
This is a story of how coalbreakers laid the foundations
for everything we callcomputing.
When the machines went quiet,their logic kept thinking in the
(15:00):
minds of those who built them.
The victory over Nazi Germanywas complete, but Blessy Park
remained a secret until the 70s.
For decades, his staff cannotspeak of what was done.
Alan Turning returned toacademic work at Manchester
University, Tommy Flowers to thepost office.
No honors, no publications, nofanfare, just silence.
(15:21):
And yet, beneath that silence,history was shifting.
Turning now imagined machinesthat could think.
Flowers vacuum tubes inspiredesigners at Cambridge and
Princeton to push electronicsfurther.
Claude Shannon in Americapublished his 1948 paper on
information theory using thesame binary logic Turning had
(15:42):
envisioned a decade earlier.
The end of one war became thebeginning of another, the war
for understanding informationitself.
At Manchester in 1948, Turninghelped build one of the first
stored program computers, but hewasn't content with speed or
storage.
He wanted to know if themachines can learn.
His 1950 essay, Computing,Machinery and Intelligence,
(16:06):
asked a simple question.
Can machine think?
He proposed a test, theimitation game, to see if a
machine response could beindistinguishable from humans.
The test became the basis formodern artificial intelligence.
Turning had already taughtmachines to calculate.
Now he wanted he wanted them tohe wanted to teach them to
(16:29):
understand.
But his country did not rewardhis brilliance.
In 1952, Turning was prosecutedfor homosexuality, then a crime
in Britain.
He lost his security clearance,his career, and tragically, his
life two years later.
It took 60 years for the Britishgovernment to apologize, and
(16:50):
nearly 70 for a royal pardon.
Yet his legacy never neededpermission.
It was already running in everymachine that could follow a
logic path.
He built a future that outlivedthe prejudice of his present.
From Codebreakers to Computing.
The idea conceived at Bresleyspread quickly after the war.
(17:11):
In Cambridge, Maurice Wilkinsbuilt the ESAC in 1949, the
first stored program computer toperform useful calculations.
In America, John von Newmanproposed a new architect,
instructions and data stored inthe same memory, the model every
computer still uses today.
Behind each blueprint was theghost of Bletchley, switches,
(17:33):
relays, and logic gates thatcould remember, compare, and
decide.
The difference between a ciphermachine and a computer was only
a matter of purpose.
As peace settled, that purposechanged, from decoding messages
to solving scientific problems,then to running businesses and
government.
By the 1950s, machines oncebuilt for war were calculating
(17:57):
ballistics, bank ledgers, andeven the path of planets.
Humanity has created a tool forreason itself.
Tommy Flower and the LostEngineer.
When Turning's name faded intoacademic footnotes, Tommy
Flowers continued workingquietly on the communication
systems.
His electronic switching methodsbecame the foundation for
(18:17):
post-war telephone andeventually computer circuit
design.
But for decades his achievement,colossus, remained classified.
He could not list it on a resumeor claim interventions and
patents.
Others built upon his workwithout knowing his name.
When his story finally surfacedin the 70s, Fisher has a Flowers
(18:38):
has already retired.
Reporters asked how it felt tobuild the first computer had
never been credited.
He smiled and said, I did itsjob.
That was enough.
The measure of innovation isn'trecognition, it's results.
Bleshley Park Reborn.
By the 1990s, historians andvolunteers fought to save
(19:00):
Bleshley Park from demolitions.
They succeeded.
Today the site is a museum andheritage center, home to the
reconstructed Colossus Mark II.
Visitors stand in awe as papertape flies through its reader
and lights blink across itspanels.
Children see it not as anartifact of war, but as
ancestors of their laptops andphones.
(19:23):
Every modern microchip is adescendant of those rotors and
valves spinning in a countryhouse.
Legacy in logic.
From Blessed Cobreakers camethree legacies.
First, the technology,electronic computing, binary
logic, and automation.
Second, the methods, teamworkacross discipline, mathematics,
(19:47):
engineer, linguistics.
And the third, the ethos, thebelief that knowledge itself can
defend freedom.
These principles will shapeeverything from NASA mission
control to the internet age.
When machines learn to serve us,it's the human who must stay
ethical.
From codebreakers tocybersecurity.
(20:08):
In a sense, we're all bledlynow.
Every encrypted email, everypassword, every cyber attack we
defend carries the DNA of theirwork.
The mathematics of Turning andTuttle live in RSA encryption,
block ciphers, and machinelearning models.
The logic that once defeatedEnigma now protects bank
(20:30):
accounts and nations.
The war for information neverended.
It just moved online.
Bletchley Park was a secret for30 years, yet its echoes last
for centuries.
From Turney's logic to FlowersEngineering, from mathematicians
to the thousands of women whokept the machines running, they
(20:50):
did more than win a war.
They provided the intelligence,human or machine, is the most
powerful, it's most powerfulwhen it serves a moral purpose.
Perhaps the greatest code theyever wrote was the one that
remains unbroken.
The example of courage andreason in time of fear.
(21:11):
And I hope that, you know, wewe've seen the story, we've all
seen, you know, if we are our ITguys, we've seen that imitation
game and we've seen what thegovernment did with Alan
Turning, but it's a you know, itshows that it was at that time.
This is one of the reasons whythey called the greatest
(21:31):
generation, is because of thesacrifices and the commitment
that they met, that theydedicated themselves in order to
defeat the Nazis.
Right?
They they did whatever it tookto win the war.
And I'm afraid that sense ofsocial responsibility and
patriotism may not exist today,you know, because times have
(21:56):
changed.
But back then, they they didwhat they had to do.
And, you know, I tip my hat offto them.
And you know, if it wasn't forthem, we wouldn't have a job.
Like I wouldn't have a job,right?
Teaching cybersecurity if itwasn't for them.
So, yeah, I'm extremely gratefulto them.
And and, you know, obviouslythey help us win the war, you
know, which is was a great oneof the greatest accomplishments
(22:20):
that they made.
But to not to have your workacknowledged, that must have
been a killer.
That must have hurt.
That must have stung reallyhard.
Not, you know, because you wantpeople to know, like, hey, I did
this.
But it's good that at least, youknow, Flowers was acknowledged
(22:40):
later on, you know, turning, Imean, this at least his family
maybe got some recognition oracknowledgement that he did what
he had to do, you know,regardless of all the personal
stuff that he had going on, thathe was able to do what he had to
do to win the war for theallies.
So my hat's off to both or andto everyone who served in World
(23:03):
War II and served in theBlessedly Park and all the other
encryptions, uh, you know, allaround as far as allies uh is
concerned.
Alright, and that brings us tothe end of our journey through
the Cold Breakers Blessing Parkand the birth of modern
computing.
I'm Professor J-Rod, and thishas been Technology Tap.
(23:24):
Until next time, stay grounded,stay curious, and as always,
keep tapping into technology.
This has been a presentation ofLittle Cha Cha Productions, art
by Sarah, music by Joe Kim.
We're now part of the Pod MatchNetwork.
You can follow me at TikTok atProfessor J Rod at J R O D, or
(23:47):
you can email me at Professor JRod J R O D at Gmail dot com.
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