At the age of 24, Alan Turing published his paper on what later became known as the Turing Machine, a conceptual computer that was a way of examining mathematical problems. This attracted the attention of Dilly Knox, who was leading the GC&CS team working on Enigma, and he recruited Turing to Bletchley Park.
Although Turing was untidy and often incomprehensible, he was both mathematically and mechanically brilliant. He headed Bletchley Park's hut 8 team, which worked on the complicated naval Enigma keys, and designed the first British bombe decoding machines, often coming up with innovative ways to reduce the length of the decryption runs. While working in America on the design of high-speed bombes he handed control of hut 8 to someone more talented in administration, without regret since by that time he regarded naval Enigma as largely solved.
The last couple of years at BP Turing worked as a free-floating consultant on projects such as Fish and Colossus. After the war, Turing briefly went to Germany to debrief German Intelligence operatives, but with the closing of Bletchley Park he left GC&CS employ to continue his theoretical work on computers. Shortly afterwards he was given an OBE for unspecified services during the war.
Turing had many eccentricities: in the summer he could be seen riding his bicycle while wearing a gas-mask to prevent hay-fever; he frequently was unable to speak his thoughts as fast as he could think them, so giving the impression of a speech impediment; and he was a homosexual. Turing himself neither advertised nor hid his sexuality; it was typical of him that having sorted it out for himself he didn't care what other people thought of the subject. Although illegal in Britain, at Cambridge University it was tolerated, and at Bletchley Park people had frankly far more important things to worry about.
Alas, this tolerant atmosphere made Turing careless. In 1952 he was robbed by a casual pick-up, and he made the mistake of reporting to the police what the young man had been doing in his home. This was an easy arrest for the police, and at his sentencing Turing was given the choice of imprisonment or compulsory hormone injections. He chose the injections, and over the course of two years put on weight, grew breasts, became depressed at losing his security clearance and finally killed himself by biting into an apple contaminated by cyanide.
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This page updated Mon, September 04, 2006, around about 24:00 ish (BST).