ENIGMA - ELECTROMECHANICAL ENCRYPTION MACHINE

The Enigma machine is patented in 1918 by the German Arthur Scherbius, who developed the principle of the cipher disk that had been invented in the fifteenth century by Leon Battista Alberti. Enigma is created to translate financial and commercial communications into figures. Once perfected, it is adopted by the German army and the navy, becoming the basis of Nazi Germany’s entire secrecy system. The first attempts to unravel the code are attributable to the Polish, Marian Rejewski. The discovery of a specimen of Enigma aboard the German submarine U-boat 110 is the turning point for the team of scientists assembled at Bletchley Park. Among them is Alan Turing, mathematician and cryptographer. Thanks to his skills, he creates an electromechanical computer, The Bombe, capable of interpreting the code behind Enigma. A more powerful computer, Colossus, is finally able to decode the encryption system. Destroyed at the end of the war by order of Winston Churchill, its’ existence is not announced until several years after the end of the war.