Get in touch with technology with Tech Stuff from How Stuff Works.

Hey there and welcome to TechSt Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'm an

executive producer with How Stuff Works and Love All Things Tech and today is a

Friday. We got to get down on Friday as Rebecca Black would say, but this is not an episode about Rebecca Black who I would argue is an enigma. Instead, this is an episode about the Enigma, the Enigma coding machine.

And we originally published this classic episode on October 19, 2011.

Chris Paulette and I talk about the Enigma Machine, what it was, and what it took to break the code.

I hope you enjoy, and I'll talk to you again in just a moment.

Today we're going to talk about something that actually came to mind when during the process of recording our episode on quantum computers which were led to a discussion of quantum cryptography and cryptography is something that

actually fascinates probably just about all of how stuff works.com considering.

And it also comes to play it touches on another podcast topic that we tackled months and months ago

mr. Turing oh yes Alan Turing is going to come up in this very important in this

discussion as well we're talking about the specifically the Enigma

machine which was a cipher machine used by Germany during World War II.

Yeah, the funny thing is, if you've watched any history or read any history about World War II and specifically the war between Germany and the allies, you have a sense of what this machine meant to the German

war effort. But the thing is, what I don't think comes across in a lot of those discussions is that there's no one

enigma machine and it certainly wasn't unknown to the world before that because

the the enigma goes back years before the start of

World War II. It was actually a commercial machine used to encrypt messages.

And in fact because it was a commercial, it gave some people a leg up on figuring out how to crack the code.

Because it was generally considered to be a practically uncrackable code if you were to follow the most careful

security procedures possible and we'll get into why that is but before I think

before we jump into what the machine did and what how it did it.

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