Enigma: The making and breaking

The December talk will be given by Alan Watson, OBE, who will be talking about the ciphers and cipher machines.

Alan is a former Merchant Navy radio and electronics officer whose duties included codes and ciphers.  This sparked a lifelong interest in the subject and led to a collection of machines, including a German Enigma which will be demonstrated. 

The story of Enigma is now well known so Alan will concentrate on the development of cipher machines, in particular what made Enigma special and why it was so hard to crack.  He will explain the methods used to crack it starting from the early attempts by the Polish cryptographers through to the mechanised approach at Bletchley Park.

There will be an opportunity to get “hands on” to four machines; a German 3 rotor, a Swiss NEMA, a Swedish Hagelin and a Russian Fialka.