ARTÍCULO No. 4
(As promised, this is the English version of the former in Spanish article aired on July delivery of the articles of my blog)
The most famous of the group that broke the German Enigma machine codes was Alan Turing. He was one the people who seem to be one step ahead of the rest of us in the field of math and science. He and his team at Bletchley Park, a top-secret center dedicated to contribute to code breaking during the war, helped to turn the tide of the conflict by decrypting the Nazi’s most difficult codes.
Turing was born in 1912, the second of three brothers.
As a young man, Turing was incredibly intelligent, and athletically gifted. He rode his bike everywhere, He rode 60 miles to his boarding school on his first day, stuck far away by a train strike. He made it on time.
The school didn’t always recognize Turing’s talent. He was almost stopped from taking the school certificate due to the concerns that he would fail. While he excelled in science his headmaster said: “If he is to be solely a scientific specialist, he is wasting his time at Public School”
In 1928 Turing met a new classmate called Christofer Morcom. The two young men became very close friends.
They also explore intellectual problems in physics and math together. They would see passing notes to each other during class.
The two boys were very close and at this time Alan supposedly developed a crush on Christopher. Their friendship did not last through as in 1930 when Alan was 17 years old, Christopher died of tuberculosis. After his friend’s death, Alan threw himself into trying to unravel the nature of consciousness and how it was linked to the matter. This led Alan to think about the concept of the mind as a machine that could be recreated with mathematical logic.
Turing attended King’s College, Cambridge. He received a distinguished degree 1n 1934 and Fellowship of King's College 1n 1035.
He attended Princeton University for a couple of years returning to England just prior to the war.
As war broke out in Europe in 1939, Alan went to work at the British Cryptanalytic Headquarters at Bletchley Park. The people at British Park worked 24 hours a day to break the German codes and give the Allies prior knowledge of German intentions to be used on the battle fields, skies, and oceans and “see” inside the German Reich to try to understand the working of the murderous regime.
At Bletchley, Turing was known to be somewhat eccentric. He would ride to work in a gas mask to protect him from pollen. His bike had a chain, and instead of replacing it, he kept time in his head, counting out the pedal rotations it would take before it fell off – then repairing it before it did. He also chains his mug to a radiator to avoid it getting taken by someone else.
In “Hut 8”, Turing, who was always referred as “Prof”, and his team elaborated upon the early computer design by Poles working to break German Enigma Machine codes.
With this work and Turing ability to see patterns and equations, the team in Hut 8 began to break additional German codes, most famously, the U-boat codes, which used to order the German submarine fleet toward their victims and hunting grounds.
As the war progressed, and the cyphers became more complex, Turing and the team at Bletchley invented more complicated machines to rapidly decrypt the German communications.
At its peak Bletchley was decrypting 84 000 communications each month.
After WWII, Winston Churchill called the submarine threat the only thing that really scared him during the war. Though many worked on this problem and others, without Alan Turing, the solution to the problem might have taken much longer (time the Allies did not have), or may not even have happened at all.This work, undoubtedly shortened the war and saved many lives. It also laid the groundwork for the technological age we live in today.
For this work during the war, Turing was awarded with the Order of British Empire by the King, but this, like his work, remained secret for years. Turing was gay and the decade before its “de-criminalization” 1n 1967, homosexuality was prosecuted in England as well as many other nations. After WWII, and as the Cold War began to “hear up”, Turing was arrested for “gross indecency”
Taking a guilty plea, Turing was offered prison or conditional probation. He took probation. As a condition of the probation, he had to take large doses of “hormone therapy”, the aim was to render him physically incapable of having sex, and the treatment had terrible side-effects on his health and wellbeing.
After the conviction, he was barred from doing any further government work and his security clearance was revoked.
His past was subject to investigation, as the authorities were worried that his homosexuality could have been used as blackmail by the Soviet Union. No evidence of which has ever been found.
On July 8th, 1952, Turing’s housekeeper found his body. A half-eaten apple which was never checked for poison, and a “To Do” list was by his bedside. The official cause of death was suicide though many have cast doubt upon this conclusion
In the years following his death, Turing’s work became more and more recognized by the public and a groundswell of support to rectify the injustice of Turing’s life came to the fore.
In 2009, after intense lobbying the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom made an apology for the treatment of Turing, but he was not officially pardoned. The UK justice minister said that a pardon was “not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convinced of what at the time was a criminal offense”
In 2012 many influential people, including Stephen Hawking, lobbied the UK government to officially pardon Turing:
One of the most brilliant mathematicians of the modern era. Yet successive governments seem incapable of forgive his conviction for then crime of being homosexual.
In 1013 the Queen gave him Royal Pardon. The Prime Minister, David Cameron, said: “His action saved countless lives. He also lofts a remarkable national legacy through substantial scientific achievements, often being referred to as being the father of modern computing”
Stephen Fry said at the time: “At bloody last. Next step a bank notes if there is any justice”
In 2014, the movie “The Imitation Game” starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, was released, depicting Turing’s struggles, and lending impetus to a new realization of his genius and knowledge of his persecution.
In June 2019, the British government announced that Turing’s likeness would be placed on the 50-sterling note.
A small comfort to those who knew and supported Turing, the note contains an appropriately enigmatic quote from Turing: “This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be” (Which is a quote from Alan Turing, in an interview to The Times newspaper on June 11th, 1949)
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