Skip to content

TechRepublic

  • Top Products
  • AI
  • Developer
  • Payroll
  • Security
  • Project Management
  • Accounting
  • CRM
  • Academy
Resources
  • TechRepublic Premium
  • TechRepublic Academy
  • Newsletters
  • Resource Library
  • Forums
  • Sponsored
Go Premium
Popular Topics
  • Top Products
  • AI
  • Developer
  • Payroll
  • Security
  • Project Management
  • Accounting
  • CRM
  • Academy
  • Project Management
  • Innovation
  • Cheat Sheets
  • Big Data
  • Tech Jobs
View All Topics
Go Premium
Hardware

Alan Turing: Exhibition Offers Rare Glimpse of the Man Behind the Enigma

By Nick Heath March 6, 2012, 12:42 AM PST

Image
1
of 13

turing1a.jpg
turing1a.jpg
Alan Turing: Exhibition Offers Rare Glimpse of the Man Behind the Enigma

British mathematician Alan Turing is known as the father of modern computing. Decades before the onset of the information age, Turing conceived what he called a “universal machine”, laying the groundwork for today’s PCs and smartphones.

Yesterday, a new exhibition celebrating the life of Turing was launched at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, UK. During World War II, Turing was based at Bletchley and played a crucial role in cracking ciphers used to scramble German communications, including designing an electromechanical machine called the bombe, which partially automated the code-breaking.

The exhibition covers Turing’s personal life and professional achievements, ranging from his school reports to academic papers where he set out his model for the universal machine.

Photo: Nick Heath/TechRepublic

Alan Turing: Exhibition Offers Rare Glimpse of the Man Behind the Enigma

Here’s an excerpt from Turing’s paper On Computable Numbers, published in 1936, in which Turing describes his universal machine.

The machine’s ability to write and read programs and data to and from memory, known as the stored-program concept, would give it the versatility to tackle almost any problem thrown at it. That flexible stored program architecture is at the heart of the modern computer’s ability to carry out anything from word processing to photo editing.

The versatility of the universal machine and today’s general-purpose computers stems from their ability to tackle new computational problems without the need to reconfigure the hardware. They can solve new sorts of problems by simply calling on different programs and data from memory.

Not only that, but if a program’s instructions are stored inside a writable computer memory, then the program can modify its behaviour as it runs, which made it easier for early computers to carry out intelligent behaviour such as conditional branching.

Turing’s interest in building a computer was reinforced by his experiences at Bletchley Park, where he witnessed the Colossus electronic computer helping to decipher intercepted Nazi communications by carrying out high-speed statistical analysis.

Photo: Nick Heath/TechRepublic

Alan Turing: Exhibition Offers Rare Glimpse of the Man Behind the Enigma

ntTuring drew up designs for the Automatic Computing Engine or ACE, whose capabilities would be a step beyond those of Colossus, in that it would be a stored-program and general-purpose computer.

ACE, which was built and installed at the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington, generated excited headlines in the British press when it ran its first program in 1950, with one paper proclaiming, “ACE may be the fastest brain, month’s work in a minute”.

ACE had a clock speed of 1MHz, making it exceptionally fast for its day. A room-sized commercial version of the first model called DEUCE was also produced and became the foundation of the emerging British computer industry.

The first personal desk-side computer, the Bendix G-15, was also based on Turing’s ACE design. Marketed by the US-based Bendix Corporation from 1954, the G-15 looked like a jumbo-size kitchen refrigerator and was the forerunner of the modern desktop computer.

Photo: Courtesy of the National Physical Laboratory

Alan Turing: Exhibition Offers Rare Glimpse of the Man Behind the Enigma

Here is a patent related to Turing’s ACE. The National Physical Laboratory pilot model of ACE, built by Donald Davies, Michael Woodger and others, was a much smaller computer than Turing originally specified.

Photo: Nick Heath/TechRepublic

Alan Turing: Exhibition Offers Rare Glimpse of the Man Behind the Enigma

Written after Turing’s departure from the National Physical Laboratory in 1950, Computing Machinery and Intelligence is considered to be one of Turing’s most important papers.

In it, Turing explored ideas relating to artificial intelligence, attempting to define the most reliable way of answering the question, “Can machines think?”.

The paper is where Turing posited the now famous Turing test, a method of assessing whether a computer is sentient. In the test, which Turing refers to as an “imitation game”, an interrogator asks questions of two players, one human and one a computer, and tries to determine which is which.

Turing said if a machine were to repeatedly pass itself off as human then it would “near enough” answer the question, “Can machines think?”.

Photo: Nick Heath/TechRepublic

Alan Turing: Exhibition Offers Rare Glimpse of the Man Behind the Enigma

Alan Turing: Exhibition Offers Rare Glimpse of the Man Behind the Enigma

Here is the back panel of the rebuilt bombe machine at Bletchley. At the launch of the exhibition, Bletchley Park codebreaker Captain Jerry Roberts, now aged 91, who worked on cracking the Tunny cipher used by Hitler’s high command, paid tribute to Turing’s contribution in helping decipher Nazi messages.

“In the spring of 1941, Britain was losing the war. The German wolf packs were sinking the ships bringing in food and raw materials to Britain left, right and centre – and of course we didn’t know where they were out there, waiting, lurking,” he said.

“At that juncture, Turing made his fantastic achievement of breaking naval Enigma. At that juncture, there was no other salvation for Britain. Once naval Enigma was broken, the sinkings dropped by 75 per cent.”

But despite his achievements at Bletchley, Turing remained a reserved figure, Roberts recalls.

“We never worked together but I used to see him walking the corridors with his gaze averted because he was a very shy man,” he said.

“He was an amazing hero, but he didn’t project himself in that way – the opposite in fact.”

Photo: Nick Heath/TechRepublic

Alan Turing: Exhibition Offers Rare Glimpse of the Man Behind the Enigma

At the heart of the Turing exhibition at Bletchley is this statue commissioned by the late Sidney E Frank, an American billionaire.

The 1.5-ton, life-size statue of Turing, the work of artist Stephen Kettle, is made from approximately half a million individual pieces of 500-million-year-old Welsh slate.

Speaking at the launch of the exhibition, Turing’s nephew Sir John Dermot Turing said if his uncle had not taken his own life at the age of 41, he might have ended up working in fields beyond computing.

“It’s clear that he was moving away from computing machinery and moving towards biological sciences.

“What fascinated him was how things in the natural world could be mathematically modelled, and I think it would have been very interesting to see what he would have contributed in the field of biology. Who knows, he may have gone into other areas as well.

“In a sort of 18th century natural philosopher kind of way he didn’t regard anything as being off limits, so he could have gone anywhere,” he said.

Photo: Nick Heath/TechRepublic

Alan Turing: Exhibition Offers Rare Glimpse of the Man Behind the Enigma

The exhibition also offers a glimpse of Alan Turing the man through a collection of personal belongings provided by his family.

Alan Turing’s nephew, Sir John, said the family hoped the personal belongings would show the human side of the mathematician.

“You hear about his eccentricities, about chaining mugs to the radiators and cycling through the locality with his gas mask on to ward off hay fever. It can paint a picture of somebody who is perhaps too weird to want to get to know,” he said.

“What this new exhibition is trying to do is to share some of the more human side of Alan Turing’s nature, to balance out the picture,” he said.

Above is a school report for Turing aged 18, which unsurprisingly paints a picture of an academically gifted student.

His maths teacher praises his skill in the subject, saying, “if he does not get flustered and lapse back into slip-shod work he should do very well”. The only subject where Turing drew much criticism was in English, where his teacher complained, “His reading is too deliberate.”

In a prescient statement, Turing’s headmaster summed up the student, by saying, “He seems to be going on very well indeed.”

Photo: Nick Heath/TechRepublic

Alan Turing: Exhibition Offers Rare Glimpse of the Man Behind the Enigma

Having reputedly never had a teddy bear as a child, Turing bought himself one as an adult, which he called Porgy.

During his time at Cambridge, Turing supposedly used to place the bear on a chair and practise his lectures in front of it.

Photo: Nick Heath/TechRepublic

Alan Turing: Exhibition Offers Rare Glimpse of the Man Behind the Enigma

Here is a biography of Alan Turing, written by his mother Sara and published at her own expense in 1959. This copy of the book was later passed to her granddaughter Shuna.

Photo: Nick Heath/TechRepublic

Alan Turing: Exhibition Offers Rare Glimpse of the Man Behind the Enigma

While studying mathematics at King’s College, Cambridge, Turing took up rowing and was selected as the first reserve in the college’s number two boat for the May “bumps”.

This picture shows the oar from the boat that was rowed by Turing in 1935, after he filled in when an oarsman broke their foot.

Photo: Nick Heath/TechRepublic

Alan Turing: Exhibition Offers Rare Glimpse of the Man Behind the Enigma

These pewter tankards were owned by Turing and commemorate the King’s College Boat Club Trial Eights in 1931 and 1934. Wear around the handles suggest that they were put to good use by Turing during his time at Cambridge.

Photo: Nick Heath/TechRepublic

  • Hardware
  • Innovation
  • Account Information

    Share with Your Friends

    Alan Turing: Exhibition Offers Rare Glimpse of the Man Behind the Enigma

    Your email has been sent

Share: Alan Turing: Exhibition Offers Rare Glimpse of the Man Behind the Enigma
Image of Nick Heath
By Nick Heath
Nick Heath is a computer science student and was formerly a journalist at TechRepublic and ZDNet.
  • Account Information

    Contact Nick Heath

    Your message has been sent

  • |
  • See all of Nick's content

Daily Tech Insider

If you can only read one tech story a day, this is it.

TechRepublic TechRepublic
  • TechRepublic on Facebook
  • TechRepublic on X
  • TechRepublic on LinkedIn
  • TechRepublic on YouTube
  • TechRepublic on Pinterest
  • TechRepublic RSS
Services
  • About Us
  • Newsletters
  • RSS Feeds
  • Site Map
  • Site Help & Feedback
  • FAQ
  • Advertise
  • Do Not Sell My Information
  • Careers
Explore
  • Downloads
  • TechRepublic Forums
  • Meet the Team
  • TechRepublic Academy
  • TechRepublic Premium
  • Resource Library
  • Photos
  • Videos
  • Editorial Policy
  • Legal Terms
  • Privacy Policy
© 2025 TechnologyAdvice. All rights reserved.
CLOSE

Create a TechRepublic Account

Get the web's best business technology news, tutorials, reviews, trends, and analysis—in your inbox. Let's start with the basics.

Already registered? Sign In
Use Facebook
Use Linkedin

* - indicates required fields

CLOSE

Sign in to TechRepublic

Not a member? Create an account
Use Facebook
Use Linkedin

Lost your password? Request a new password

CLOSE

Reset Password

Please enter your email adress. You will receive an email message with instructions on how to reset your password.

Check your email for a password reset link. If you didn't receive an email don't forgot to check your spam folder, otherwise contact support.

Back to login
1 Finish Profile
2 Newsletter Preferences
CLOSE

Welcome. Tell us a little bit about you.

This will help us provide you with customized content.

No thanks, continue without
1 Finish Profile
2 Newsletter Preferences
CLOSE

Want to receive more TechRepublic news?

Newsletter Name
Subscribe
Daily Tech Insider
Daily Tech Insider AU
TechRepublic UK
TechRepublic News and Special Offers
TechRepublic News and Special Offers International
Executive Briefing
Innovation Insider
Project Management Insider
Microsoft Weekly
Cloud Insider
Data Insider
Developer Insider
TechRepublic Premium
Apple Weekly
Cybersecurity Insider
Google Weekly
Toggle All
No thanks, continue without

You're All Set

Thanks for signing up! Keep an eye out for a confirmation email from our team. To ensure any newsletters you subscribed to hit your inbox, make sure to add [email protected] to your contacts list.

Back to Home Page
×