Right after the First World War, in 1918, a German electrical engineer; Arthur Scherbius invented the famous mechanical cipher the Enigma Machine. Well, you might be wondering what it is and why is it so famous?

The Enigma Machine is an encryption machine which was used extensively in the Nazi Germany, during the Second World War (1939-1945), to communicate confidential data in the form of coded messages in all branches of German military. Though it looked like a typewriter, but it was completely different from it. If you press on the first letter of your message, then a letter lights up indicating what it has replaced within the encrypted message.

At the initial stage of World War 2 some Polish and the French mathematicians found a lead but still could not break the code. The Enigma Code was considered impossible to break because of two big reasons; firstly, there was not enough time or manpower to work through a smashing odd of all the 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 possible combinations because individual letters were encrypted differently every time when they were entered into the Enigma Machine. Secondly, the code used to change every 24 hours, so all the work done every day by the cryptographers used to just go to waste and they had to start all over again. The Polish and the French mathematicians then initiated the British to decrypt the code. The British Military Intelligence then adopted the designation called Ultra, back in the year 1941 at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. Amongst the people who were hired was the great mathematician Alan Turing.

Those British cryptographers found some clues which helped them in breaking the code. The first clue was the Atlantic weather forecast, which was written in the same format each day. Location-detecting equipment in listening stations allowed codebreakers to find where a message was originating from and, if it matched up with the positioning of a weather station, it was likely that the word “wettervorhersage” (weather forecast) would be both present and in a similar place in every message. The second clue was the inability of the Enigma machine to code a letter as itself, which removed the permutations containing self-coding substitutions. Alan Turing had the idea that only a machine could defeat another machine. Initially, everybody used to mock at his idea, but he stayed strong and was firm on his decision of making a machine.

So, he designed a bombe - an electromechanical machine that comprised an equivalent of 36 different Enigma machines and each one contained the exact internal wiring of the German counterpart. Each Enigma machine is allocated a pair of letters from the obtained crib text. When the bombe is switched on, each of the three rotors moves, checking on approximately 17,500 possible positions until it finds a match. After this Turing’s fellow workers realised that his idea was brilliant and gave their full support to him by providing effective suggestions. As a result, the British triumphed by finally breaking the Enigma Code on 9thJuly, 1941 and as a result the Allies of the Second World War won.

Till date, project Ultra has been one of the largest successful secret operations in the world history.

In conclusion, we all can learn from this incident that even the seemingly impossible can be made possible when we put our mind into it. Turing’s machine not only helped the British win the WW2 but now it helps us too as in the present world it is called ‘Computers’- One of our biggest needs in the present age.