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Facebook donates £1 million to WWII code-breaking site Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park was the site where Alan Turing and his World War II team of code-breakers cracked Germany’s Enigma machine and helped save the world from Nazi tyranny. The site is now a popular museum, but it’s facing a £2 million ($2.6 million) revenue shortfall due to the loss of tourism caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, Facebook has announced that it will donate £1 million to the Bletchley Park Trust charity that runs the site.
Google donates $850,000 to restore home of the codebreakers
Google has donated £550,000 ($850,000) towards the £15 million project to renovate Bletchley Park. The donation from Mountain View is part of a $100 million charitable program that's previously helped rescue Alan Turing's personal papers. The country estate is the former home of Station X and the British Government's Code and Cypher School, which was where the World War Two model of the Enigma Machine was decrypted. Turing, its most famous alumnus went on to pioneer computer science and artificial intelligence during his short life and the complex now houses the National Museum of Computing. Unfortunately the buildings are rapidly collapsing and enormous investment is still required to transform the site into a museum, attraction and fitting tribute to the work of the codebreakers.
Britons build working replica of the Turing Bombe
Just in case Al Qaeda or other "evildoers" du jour decide to start communicating in code via the WWII-era Enigma code -- we'll have the Turing Bombe on our side. This working replica of the machine used by British cryptologists at Bletchley Park, the epicenter of the counter-Enigma effort was unveiled at that site earlier this week. According to an article by The Register: "The Bombes used 108 electromagnetic spinning drums to test combinations of letters and reveal the likely keys to the Enigma code used in a particular message." The article goes on to say that Churchill ordered the 200 Bombes that had been built dismantled by the end of the war, and that it wasn't until the 1970s that the classified nature of these devices was lifted. Unlike the shrouded secrecy that its original was wrapped in, this replica will be open to the public -- from September 23-24, there will be a reunion of Bletchley Park veterans and a special demonstrations with war re-enactors in period dress. No word on who will play Alan Turing, though, but our own England bureau chief, Conrad Quilty-Harper, is a likely candidate.[Via The Register]