Start hereWhy this machine matters
Between 1939 and 1945, the German military sent thousands of radio messages every day — orders to submarines, weather reports, battle plans. Anyone with a radio could listen in. That didn't worry them, because every message was scrambled by a machine called Enigma, and they believed no one on Earth could unscramble it.
They were wrong. First a team of Polish mathematicians, then thousands of people working secretly in an English country house, learned to read those messages — sometimes faster than the intended German recipients did. Historians estimate this secret work shortened the Second World War by about two years and saved millions of lives.
Enigma is a machine that turns HELLO into something like QZKMV — and, if you set it up the same way, turns QZKMV back into HELLO. The war over this machine was a battle of brains, not bullets: inventors versus mathematicians.