Secret Weapons (35 page)

Turing’s name has been widely celebrated in the decades that have elapsed since his untimely death. There are institutes, buildings, prizes, award schemes and mathematical principles all devoted to his name.
Breaking the Code
was a play about Turing’s life by Hugh Whitemore that was first performed in 1986, and was a success both in London’s West End and on Broadway, where it received three Tony Award nominations. Another successful drama about Turing’s life was screened by BBC television in 1996, and Turing’s story featured in a television documentary,
Dangerous Knowledge
, in 2008. There are commemorative plaques at his birthplace in London and his former home in Wilmslow, Cheshire, and in March 2000 a set of stamps with his portrait was issued in the Caribbean. In 2001 a statue of Turing was unveiled in Manchester and three years later a bronze statue by John Mills was unveiled at the University of Surrey, Guildford, to mark the 50th anniversary of his suicide. Another statue was unveiled in 2007 at Bletchley Park. The costs were paid by Sidney Frank, an American philanthropist.

By 1994 it was realized in Britain what a priceless piece of scientific history had been lost by the destruction of the Colossus machines, so the (by now) Sir Harold Thomas Flowers with a team of fellow-enthusiasts unearthed the original drawings for the prototypes and discovered that large parts of the computers had been hidden away by enthusiasts from Bletchley Park. They set to work to rebuild a working Colossus computer, and now that Bletchley Park has become a museum, the computer is on permanent display there, a testimony to the vital role it played in the Allied victory.

And what of the Bomba Kryptologiczna, the all-important Bombe? The remaining components were found at Bletchley and a replica was reconstructed by a team of enthusiasts led by John Harper. This complete and working replica was built at the Bletchley Park museum and was officially switched on by the Duke of Kent, patron of the British Computer Society on 17 July 2008.

When the 50th anniversary of the commissioning of ENIAC loomed in 1996, the University of Pennsylvania and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC marked the event with special publications and a huge exhibition involving senior American statesmen. Although ENIAC was designed to be physically rewired to change programming, it remains an inspiring step in the slow but steady progress of computers from Charles Babbage’s imagined machine, to the massive mainframe computers of the present day.

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In today’s world, computers are everywhere. We need to recognize that – although the components were available – it took the urgency of war and the need to defeat a highly organized foe that gave the impetus to the design of Colossus and ENIAC. When you contemplate your desktop computer, just reflect: it would certainly have arisen anyway in the fullness of time – but, as it is, even your computer is a legacy of the secret science of World War II. Be cured by antibiotics; write with a ballpoint pen; travel in a jet plane; watch space rockets on television … and just reflect that it was World War II that brought them to reality. In our modern era, everything takes so much time to change and bureaucracy weighs us down. It was very different then, when survival depended on science and time was of the essence. In my view, we could usefully embrace some of those enthusiasms in facing our present-day problems, which (like global pollution and climate change, starvation and water shortage, political expediency and scientific illiteracy) affect everyone in the world. If ever we needed to learn the lessons of that wartime sense of dynamism and purpose, it is now.

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