The curators of Bletchley Park have
announced plans to begin restoring the facility's historic codebreaking
huts as well as the buildings which housed the Bombe codebreaking
machine.
Under the plan, Codebreaking Huts 3 and
6, which housed the decryption and translation of signals intercepted
from German Enigma machines, will be restored to their World War II
condition and will allow visitors to see the conditions under which
scientists and mathematicians worked to crack the legendary cipher.
Additionally, the park plans to restore
Huts 11 and 11a, which housed the Bomb computational system. Considered
one of the forerunners to modern computers, Bombe was able to simulate
the activity of multiple Enigma machines to help crack a complex cipher
which contained millions of millions of configurations and combinations.
The foundation said that it hopes to have restoration of the huts completed by mid-2014.
The renovations are the latest in an
effort to establish Bletchley Park as both a historic location and an
educational centre teaching of the role technology and computation
played in helping the Allies win the war. Curators hope that by 2020 all
restoration work on the facility will be finished and open to the
general public.
Lead by Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park
group helped to crack an Enigma code which at the time had proven
unbreakable. Through a combination of mathematical analysis and
engineering skill, the group developed a system for reliably
intercepting and decoding German signals and orders. The intelligence
coup proved vital in the European theatre.
Post-war, however, the facility and its
staff faced a series of tragedies. After being tried on charges of
homosexuality, Turing died in 1954 after ingesting cyanide. Though the
government apologised for it's prosecution of Turing in 2009, he was
never formally pardoned.
Bletchley Park also fell on hard times
after the war, falling into a state of neglect for decades, only to be
rediscovered and championed by the scientific community as a historical
site and a rallying point for math and science education campaigns.
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