Bletchley Park: Seven Things You Should Know

Bletchley Park is a well-known story by now. Books, movies, and podcasts have all told some version of it: a country estate, a cast of brilliant eccentrics, a machine called Enigma. What most of those tellings leave out is where the story actually starts, and how far it traveled before it ended.It starts in a Polish forest, five weeks before the Nazi invasion, where a small team of mathematicians handed the British and French a working replica of Enigma along with years of mathematics the British didn't have yet. It runs through a crossword competition that doubled as a spy recruitment test, a mathematician who deduced a cipher machine's wiring without ever seeing it, and a computer that predates the one usually credited as the first - built to break a cipher most people have never heard of.It ends with four Americans boarding a British warship under assumed names, carrying a codebreaking machine of their own, and a wartime intelligence-sharing agreement so effective it quietly became the architecture much of the world still runs on today.I'm No Expert, But is a series for the curious. Short, accurate, and built around the things that most surprised the author along the way. This volume covers seven of them, plus a bonus chapter on the cipher and computer that Enigma's fame has mostly buried.