Bletchley Park and the National Museum of Computing were two places I was extremely excited to visit. Prior to the trip I read The Secret Lives of Codebreakers: The Men and Women Who Cracked the Enigma Code at Bletchley Park by Sinclair McKay. The book illustrated life at Bletchley Park during WWII so wonderfully I couldn't wait to walk the grounds where geniuses like Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers had lived and worked.
The National Museum of Computing had several machines from WWII including the Lorenz S742, which was the cipher machine that Germany used to create their unbreakable codes, the Bombe machines that Alan Turing created to decipher German codes, and Tommy Flower's machine Colossus that helped decipher codes as well. The Bombe machine and Colossus were not the original machines, but rebuilds that showed how they worked. Even after reading the book and watching the demonstration I'm still not sure I understand how the machine works. I don't think I could have been a codebreaker...best stick to librarianship! Here are some photos from our time at the museum and exploring the grounds of Bletchley Park.
(1) Colossus machine (2) Enigma machine used at Bletchley Park (3) Lorenz SZ42 (4) Bletchley Park grounds cat (5) Bombe machine
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