Geniuses at War
Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
The dramatic, untold story of the brilliant team whose feats of innovation and engineering created the world’s first digital electronic computer—decrypting the Nazis’ toughest code, helping bring an end to WWII, and ushering in the information age.
• Winner, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Middleton Award for "a book ... that both exemplifies exceptional scholarship and reaches beyond academic communities toward a broad public audience." • A Kirkus Best Book of 2022 •
Planning the invasion of Normandy, the Allies knew that decoding the communications of the Nazi high command was imperative for its success. But standing in their way was an encryption machine they called Tunny (British English for “tuna”), which was vastly more difficult to crack than the infamous Enigma cipher.
To surmount this seemingly impossible challenge, Alan Turing, the Enigma codebreaker, brought in a maverick English working-class engineer named Tommy Flowers who devised the ingenious, daring, and controversial plan to build a machine that would calculate at breathtaking speed and break the code in nearly real time. Together with the pioneering mathematician Max Newman, Flowers and his team produced—against the odds, the clock, and a resistant leadership—Colossus, the world’s first digital electronic computer, the machine that would help bring the war to an end.
Drawing upon recently declassified sources, David A. Price’s Geniuses at War tells, for the first time, the full mesmerizing story of the great minds behind Colossus and chronicles the remarkable feats of engineering genius that marked the dawn of the digital age.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Price (The Pixar Touch) delivers a solid history of how Allied codebreakers at Bletchley Park developed "the first operational digital computers" to defeat Germany's vaunted Lorenz SZ cipher machines. Crediting Bletchley Park's successes to a "strain of meritocracy existed, even if only on the margins, within a powerful system of social class," Price notes that the British signals intelligence agency initially thought the "right type of recruit" for cryptography were academics who had experience with art history, law, German, and the classics. However, it was mathematician Alan Turing who cracked the Enigma codes, and mathematician Max Newman and telephone engineer Tommy Flowers (a self-taught specialist in "large-scale digital electronics") who designed and built Colossus, a programmable computer that allowed British codebreakers "to read the Third Reich's highest-level military communications system, including messages from Hitler himself." Price briskly relates the technical aspects of the story and includes plenty of gossip and droll anecdotes, noting, for instance, that the Germans refused to believe the British had broken the Enigma codes because they were so bad at encrypting their own messages. Much of this will be familiar to WWII history buffs, but those looking for an entertaining introduction to Bletchley Park and the era's technological innovations would do well to start here.
