For more information please contact Thomas Purcell at thomaspurcell@eaton.com

Booking not required

Bletchley Park Museums

Speaker: Nick Hill

Nick’s talk is not intended as a potted tour of the two museums on the Bletchley Park site: Bletchley Park Trust (BPT) and The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC).

Instead, Nick will show and describe what you might see when you make your visit(s).

In BPT you will discover the story of the breaking of Enigma, which gave Germany and its allies the equivalent capability of today’s battlefield tweets.  Enigma was used for the encryption of short messages at all levels, except the highest, of the German ‘war machine’.

At TNMOC you will discover the story of the breaking of the Lorenz encryption machine.  Lorenz was more sophisticated than Enigma – 183 million, million, million possible settings, as opposed to Enigma’s 156 million, million – and was unknown to the Allies at the start of the war.  It was used by Hitler and all the members of the German High Command to encrypt messages relating to their strategic plans, battle plans etc.  The breaking of Lorenz from the interception of just two messages is ranked as one of the most astonishing intellectual achievements of the 20th century.

Nick has been a volunteer at both BPT and TNMOC for over ten years.  During this time he has built up a considerable set of background information with which to illustrate his talks.