The Typewriter That Lied

Imagine a typewriter that lies to you. In the 1920s through the 1940s, Germany used the Enigma machine to hide secret messages. If you typed the letter "A," electricity shot through a shifting maze of wires and lit up a totally different letter, like "G."

The secret was inside three spinning wheels called rotors. Every single time you pressed a key, the first rotor clicked forward, completely changing the maze. Press "A" three times, and it might light up as "G," then "P," then "W."

Who could solve a puzzle with billions of changing answers? A team of brilliant Polish mathematicians, including Marian Rejewski, mapped the Enigma's wiring in 1932. In 1938, they built a clacking electro-mechanical machine called the bomba to track the moving maze.

When World War II erupted, an ultra-secret team of British code-breakers at Bletchley Park took the baton. Mathematicians like Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman built a massive, improved machine called the Bombe to test thousands of rotor positions at once.

By searching for a "crib"—a guessed word, like "WEATHER"—the Bombe could sniff out the exact daily setting. This incredible international teamwork unraveled Germany’s deepest secrets and helped end the war.