Society General Meeting

Talk: Reconstruction of a WWII Turing-Welchman Bombe

John Harper

The Turing-Welchman Bombes were used during WWII to find the settings on German Enigma machines, so that German messages could be read by the Allies. It is often said that the intelligence gained at Bletchley Park helped us win the war. John will explain briefly how the Bombes worked, followed by how SMEE members made many parts without which the reconstructed Bombe would not have been completed.

The machine has been demonstrated by a team of operators almost every day since the official ‘switch on’ by HRH The Duke of Kent on Tues 17 July 2008. Many live challenges have been made where the machine successfully found the Enigma setting of messages enciphered by GCHQ on three occasions and once by German Computer Museum