Before Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, there was Alan Turing, who was widely considered to be the father of modern computers. His greatest contribution was cracking coded German messages that helped the Allies win World War II. Yet he would later be betrayed by the country he protected. Turing was born on June 23, 1912, in a nursing home in Maida Vale, an affluent district in central London.
His father Julius was a civil servant who was posted to India, his mother Ethel, who was the daughter of the chief engineer of the Madras Railway. They wanted their children, Alan and his brother John, raised in England, so they returned home. In primary school, the headmistress quickly saw Turing's potential, saying she has had clever boys and hard-working boys, but Alan is a genius. At the age of 13, he was packed off to boarding school. On his first day, he had to ride his bike 60 miles, 97 kilometers, to get to Sherbourne School in southwest England because of a public transport strike.
He demonstrated impressive athletic ability for much of his life. His best marathon time was 2 hours and 46 minutes, which doesn't look great by today's standards, but at the time, it nearly qualified him for the Olympics. An injury would put a stop to that dream.
His calling would lie in mathematics. At school, some of his teachers were not impressed. On his report card for his second last year at Sherbourne, his English teacher noted, Reading weak.
Essays show ideas, but are more grandiose. than pointed. Despite the less than stellar performance in some subjects, he showed brilliance in the ones he loved.
Before leaving boarding school, he had grasped the most complicated works of Newton and Einstein, forcing the headmaster to acknowledge that his young scholar was a gifted and distinguished boy whose future career we shall watch with much interest. Turing shared his interest in math and science with Christopher Morcombe, a fellow student at Sherbourne. A deep friendship developed. Morcombe has been described as Turing's first love, though the feeling was not reciprocated. Morcombe died unexpectedly while in his teens from bovine tuberculosis, which he had contracted from drinking tainted milk.
Turing was overcome by sorrow. He was determined, however, to continue his own journey to Cambridge University, writing to Morcombe's mother, I know I must put as much energy, if not as much interest into my work, as if he were alive, because that is what he would like me to do. Turing was awarded first-class honors in mathematics.
He was elected a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, soon after. And then he made the journey to the U.S. for a Ph.D. at Princeton. In 1936, at the age of 23, he published his epic paper on the Turing machine, a mathematical model that described a device that could solve any problem, performing any task for which a program could be written. Turing had, in effect, conceived the world's first computer. While at Princeton, he went on to build the first stages of an electromechanical binary multiplier, a machine for multiplying binary numbers that may have sparked his interest in cryptology.
At the time, he would have no idea how important this would be in defeating the forces of evil. Hitler's stormtroopers were settling into the Rhineland, an area along the Rhine River in western Germany that was supposed to remain demilitarized according to the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. The reoccupation would be the beginning of the path to all-out war three years later. In 1938, when he returned to his fellowship at Cambridge University, he was recruited to join the Government Code and Cypher School part-time. And when war broke out the following year, Turing moved over full-time to the organization's headquarters at Bletchley Park, a sprawling estate north of London.
It was here that he focused on cracking the infamous Enigma Code, used by Nazi Germany's military to send secret messages. Everything from weather reports to strategic information. The Enigma looked like a typewriter.
It substituted one letter for another to encrypt a message. A letter coming into the router and coming out would look different. The clever thing about it is that there were 103 sextillion possible combinations.
Historian and wartime codebreaker Asa Briggs wrote, you needed exceptional talent. You needed genius at Bletchley. And Turing's was that genius.
Polish mathematicians had already figured out how to read the messages before their country was invaded in 1939 and shared the information with the Allies. But at the outbreak of war, the Germans began to change the settings on the machine every midnight, Berlin time, which made it all but impossible to decipher the thousands of messages sent every day. Turing and fellow codebreaker Gordon Welchman developed a machine called the BOM that was designed to discover which settings Enigma used to scramble messages.
It replicated the action of several Enigma machines wired together. Each of the rapidly rotating drums simulated the action of an Enigma rotor. The bomb managed to crack Enigma. Bletchley Park became a code-breaking factory.
200 bombs cracked messages, sometimes within an hour or two of it being transmitted by the Nazis, or even within minutes. As early as 1943, Turing's machines cracked 84,000 messages a month, or a staggering message every two minutes. He then turned his attention to the more complex naval enigmas. This work was crucial.
German U-boats, submarines, were hunting down so many Allied ships in the Atlantic that Prime Minister Winston Churchill feared that the UK would starve of food. raw materials, and war supplies. Thankfully, Turing headed a team that managed to decode the naval signals by 1941 so that Allied ships could better avoid these coordinated submarine attacks.
If Turing failed to crack the Enigma code, the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944, D-Day, would have been delayed by at least a year. Hitler could have strengthened his coastal defenses by then to withstand the Allied assault. Yet there was still more work to be done.
The Germans had an even more sophisticated cipher machine. The Lorenz was personally used by Hitler and his top generals to communicate the most high-level messages. Lorenz had more wheels than Enigma. The pattern was far more complex.
Turing developed a code-breaking technique called Turingary that fed into work by others, including Captain Jerry Roberts, to crack the uncrackable Lorenz. And by the end of the war, Turing also developed a device that allowed people to speak securely over the phone or the radio by scrambling their voices. Delilah was years ahead of its time.
It was portable, unlike the secure phone system connecting 10 Downing Street and the White House that was so large it had to be installed in the basement of a department store on London's Oxford Street. Some historians estimate that the work at Bletchley shortened the war by at least two years. and saved at least 14 million lives, if not many millions more. And without it, the outcome of the war could have been very different.
One might expect the United Kingdom to have been grateful. However, Turing's work was top secret. He had to sign the Official Secrets Act, which prohibited him from disclosing anything about his time at Bletchley Park.
Wartime information wouldn't be declassified until the 70s. So while Turing was awarded an Order of the British Empire medal at the end of the conflict, there was no public acknowledgement of his contribution to the war effort. Many people learned of it for the first time when the Oscar-winning film, The Imitation Game, was released in 2014. After the war, Turing took up a post at the University of Manchester, focused on creating the first functioning British computers.
He was also among the first to conceive of artificial intelligence. He had an idea that computers would become so powerful that they would think. He devised the Turing test, also called the imitation game, as a way of determining whether a computer can think like a person. An observer questions a human and a computer and has to decide which is the human and which is the computer. If the computer can engage in a conversation with a human without being detected as a machine, it is deemed to have demonstrated human intelligence.
A computer program is said to have passed the Turing test in 2014 by simulating a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy. In 1951, Turing received the UK's highest scientific award when he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, the National Science Academy. However, his elation was short-lived. A year later, he was convicted of homosexual acts. He had reported a burglary to police, but changed details of his story to cover up his relationship with a 19-year-old man who confessed to knowing the culprit.
He later admitted to the relationship and was convicted of gross indecency. Homosexuality was a criminal offense at the time. Turing didn't want to go to jail, so he agreed to chemical castration, a hormone treatment that was supposed to suppress his sexual desires. A decade earlier, he withdrew his marriage proposal to cryptanalyst Joan Clark, who also worked on Enigma, after explaining his sexuality, which came as no surprise to her.
Ironically, because he now had a criminal record, he was prohibited from ever working for the British government's post-war code-breaking centre. He was shut out of the field that he helped revolutionize. Two years later, in 1954, Turing was poisoned by cyanide. He was 41 years old. A half-eaten apple lay by his bedside when he died.
The speculation is that he bit into the apple laced with a deadly chemical. However, the coroner never tested it for cyanide. The official verdict was suicide. It has been noted that the evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning. On September 10, 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown publicly apologized for Turing's treatment.
He said, On behalf of the British government and all those who live freely, thanks to Alan's work, I'm very proud to say we're sorry. You deserved so much better. And in 2017, the UK Parliament passed the Alan Turing Law, which wiped out the criminal records of 49,000 men convicted of same-sex offences. Today, thanks to Alan Turing, we live in a world where information, including this video, can be transmitted with just a click of a button. His work also made a myth about Apple's logo take hold, that it must surely pay homage to Alan Turing.
The man who designed the artwork, Rob Janoff, denied it. And before his own death in 2011, Steve Jobs himself said, it isn't true. But God, we wish it were.
Turing helped kickstart the computer age that has made it possible for you and me to access any information we like, including online classes, which brings me to the sponsor of this video. Skillshare is like the Netflix of educational videos. It's an online learning community where you can get access to thousands of classes.
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Thanks for watching. For Newsthink, I'm Cindy Pom.