340 The ULTRA Secret

The History of the Twentieth Century

Mark Painter

History

4.8 • 719 Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After the fall of Poland, British Intelligence's codebreaking operation at Bletchley Park became the center of efforts to decrypt messages from the Germans' supposedly unbreakable Enigma machine.

Transcript

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0:00.0	At the beginning of the war, British intelligence took over from the polls the task of decrypting messages set through the German Enigma machine.
0:28.6	Fortunately for them, they already had on the payroll one of the world's leading mathematicians.
0:36.6	Welcome to the history of the world's leading mathematicians.
0:41.3	Welcome to the history of the 20th century. Thank you. Episode 340, The Ultra Secret
1:18.0	Alan Turing was born on June 23, 1912.
1:26.8	His father, Julius Turing, worked in the Indian Civil Service.
1:32.6	His mother, born Ethel Stoney, was the daughter of an Anglo-Irish family.
1:39.2	The Turing's had two children. The first was another son, John Turing, born while his parents were living in
1:46.4	India. Baby John came down with a case of dysentery at the age of six weeks, which convinced
1:54.4	his parents that their children should grow up in England and not India. Alan, the younger son, was born in London while his father was in England on leave from the Indian Civil Service.
2:06.6	When the elder touring's returned to India, they left their two sons behind in England with another family,
2:14.6	which was common practice among families within the Indian Civil Service.
2:20.6	At the age of 13, Alan Turing was sent to Sherbourne School, a boarding school for boys in the town
2:28.0	of Sherbourne in Dorset. He was sent off to school along a route that took him by boat to Southampton,
2:35.0	and from there he was to ride by train to Sherbourne.
2:39.0	Unfortunately for young Alan, the great British general strike of 1926 broke out just at that point in his journey.
2:49.0	The railway workers walked out, and Alan was stranded in Southampton.
2:54.9	He joked about disguising himself as a shipment of milk, since milk was the one cargo the striking
3:01.2	railway workers were still willing to transport. In fact, he had his bicycle with him, and so he cycled the 62 miles to Sherbourne.
3:12.3	It took him two days with a stopover at an inn for the night.
3:16.9	He arrived at school a day late, but his determination to get there, despite the obstacles, made the local newspaper and instantly made him popular at the school,
3:27.3	especially among the teachers. That didn't last. The school offered a classical education,
	...

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