During the World Wars and, in particular, in the Second war, the development of technology for military purposes has become a fundamental part: from increased weapons, use of planes and submarines to the use of communication and interception devices, such as radio transmitters and the radars. These devices were associated with the machinesciphers, that is, machines producing combinatorial codes, equipped with cryptographic rotors, whose most significant representative was the machinePuzzle, incorporated into the German armed forces in the 1920s. The presence of advanced encryption technology in World War II was a determining factor in the very dynamics of the war, but it also culminated in the invention of the world's first computer.
The history of the machine model Puzzle dates back to an invention of the Dutch HugoAlexanderKoch. Koch's invention consisted of a prototype machine with electromechanical rotors capable of producing secret messages. However, despite having patented the invention, Koch did not carry out its development. This role was in charge of the duo
Scherbius& Ritter.In 1918, electrical engineer Arthur Sherbius and his friend Richard Ritter set up a factory to develop and mass-produce cryptographic machines. Scherbius and Ritters tried several times to sell the models to the German navy, suggesting the benefit of the technology to the military. The machines were purchased by the navy in the 1920s and started to be used, above all, in submarines. In the 1930s, already in the Nazi period, there was an improvement in the model Puzzle and its use began to spread among the German army as well.
The use of the machine required a great deal of care, from setting the key that activated the machine to using the codes manual. The key used to configure the machine should have its code changed daily, otherwise it will be tracked by similar technology and have its messages decrypted. Already during World War II, when the machines Puzzle were widely used by German military intelligence, a group of Polish mathematicians and engineers, in together with British military intelligence, it managed to develop a model even more advanced than that of the Germans. This model managed for the first time to decipher the codes of the Puzzle.
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The operation orchestrated by Poles and British became known as Ultra. As the historian Norman Davies highlights, in his work Europe at War, “Project Ultra was established at Bletchley Park, in the Midlands of England, in late 1939. […] They found that some German radio operators, especially a man named Walter, were ignoring the instructions and starting their machines with the same key every day. They correctly calculated that German units spread across Europe would transmit identical messages by the Führer's birthday in April 1940. And they got their hands on an updated Enigma machine that the British navy had obtained from a German meteorological ship captured off Greenland.” [1]
From these “lapses” by the Germans, the British were able to dismantle the structure of codes used by the Nazis. In a second moment, the Germans even came to develop a more sophisticated model, called the B-schreiber, in 1944. To apprehend the codes of this new model, the collaboration of what is now revered as the "father of computing" was necessary. AlanTuring. The invention of the famous electromechanical calculator, known as bomb (Pump), by Turing, increased the ability to decipher the codes of the Puzzle. And this invention led to the creation of colossus – the first of computers. Norman Davies makes this clear in the book already cited:
“Then the bomb de Turing, an electromechanical calculator, was able to figure out the permutations and produce answers. In the second year of the war, Bletcheley Park was reading all Enigma broadcasts three hours after the start of each day. They accompanied all the updates that the Germans made. And, in 1944, to rival the B-schreiber, invented the world's first electronic computer, the Colossus." [2].
[1] Davies, Norman. Europe at War (1939-1945). Lisbon: Editions 70, 2008. pp. 55.
[2] Idem, p.56.
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
