BLETCHLEY PARK ENIGMA

Need the sounds of the Bletchley Park Engima Machine for your next production? Check this out…

Bletchley Park, in Milton Keynes, England, was the central site of the United Kingdom’s Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), which during the Second World War regularly penetrated the secret communications of the Axis Powers – most importantly the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers.

An Enigma machine was a series of electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines developed and used in the early to early-mid twentieth century for commercial and military usage. Enigma was invented by the German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I.

Early models were used commercially from the early 1920s, and adopted by military and government services of several countries, most notably Nazi Germany before and during World War II.

In late 1939, Alan Turing and another Cambridge mathematician,Gordon Welchman, designed a new machine, the British Bombe. The basic property of the Bombe was that it could break any Enigma-enciphered message, provided that the hardware of the Enigma was known and that a plain-text ‘crib’ of about 20 letters could be guessed accurately.