In the early 1920s, German engineer Arthur Scherbius patented a compact rotor typewriter he called ‘Enigma’, hoping businesses would pay for instant private telegraphy; polished black boxes soon sat on bankers’ desks, their lamps flickering each time a key was tapped.By 1930 the German armed forces had bought up the design, added extra rotors and plugs, and issued daily code sheets that shifted wiring paths with the stroke of every key, certain no outsider could keep pace with the machine’s whirring permutations.Across the border in 1932, Polish mathematicians Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski treated each message like an algebra problem, rebuilt the internal wiring on paper, and built their own ‘bomba’ device that could step through rotor positions faster than any typist.On the eve of war they handed their work to British and French intelligence; at Bletchley Park, Alan Turing’s team expanded the bomba into rows of humming bombes that sifted pastry-thin slivers of probability, prying open signals from U-boats that stalked Atlantic convoys.Every cracked key sheet fed Ultra, the flow of intercepts that guided convoys, masked D-Day, and, many historians judge, shaved months—perhaps years—from the fighting.When peace arrived the wooden cases looked ordinary again, but like the Rosetta Stone that once unsealed ancient scripts, Enigma’s battered keyboards became a symbol of how numbers, patience and shared effort can turn secrets into history.

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Enigma Machine