The Enigma Machine

  • Period: to

    first machine

    Two Dutch Naval invented a machine to encrypt messages
  • patended the machine

    patended the machine
    1918, Arthur Scherbius, a German businessman, patented the Enigma machine.
  • marian rejewski

    marian rejewski
    Marian Rejewski built his own model of the Enigma machine without having actually seen it.
  • Mid 1920's

    Mid 1920's
    Mid 1920s, mass production of Enigma machine with 30,000 machines being sold to the German military over the next 2 decades
  • mid days

    mid days
    The Poles set up a world leading crypt analysis bureau and hired leading mathematicians such as Marian Rejewski.
  • 6 replicas of the machine

    6 replicas of the machine
    To find the daily key, Rejewski build 6 replicas of the Enigma machine and connected them
  • the new machine

    the new machine
    The new machine could run through more than 17,000 indicator settings. He called this machine, ‘the bomb’.
  • the bomb was used

    the bomb was used
    The bomb was used to secretly read the traffic from the German Enigma machines for several years.
  • added new roters

    added new roters
    In 1938 Germans added two new roters into the Enigma machine. This made it harder for the Poles to read the traffic
  • asking for allies

    asking for allies
    The Poles asked their allies, Britian and France to help them with the analysis and codebreaking of the German messages.
  • German traitor

    German traitor
    In 1931, a German traitor told Rejewski that the Germans routinely changed the daily key indicator setting for the codes.
  • british smuggle out the machine

    british smuggle out the machine
    The British smuggle out the Enigma replica machines two weeks before Germany invaded Poland
  • brithish codes taken

    brithish codes taken
    The smuggled Enigma replicas were taken to the British code . and cypher school at Bletchley Park.
  • turing used 180 bombs

    turing used 180 bombs
    Turing used 180 ‘bombs’ which clicked round letter-by-letter, 20 every second, until they hit the correct one.
  • turning

    turning
    Alan Turing, a British mathematician at Bletchley Park thought of a different way of using the ‘bombs’ for testing the German codes
  • british eneginneer

    british eneginneer
    In 1943, British engineer, Tommy Flowers, created Colossus
  • hundreds of codes

    hundreds of codes
    Hundreds of code breakers at Blechley Park worked round the clock to decipher the German Enigma communications they intercepted
  • coud

    coud
    Colossus could read paper tape at 5,000 characters a second.
  • co

    co
    Colossus changed the way code breaking was done from electro-mechanical to electronic – it was the first modern day computer
  • the allied worked

    the allied worked
    The Allied work on codebreaking played a key role in victories such as D-Day. It shortened the length of WW2.