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I highly appreciate your emphasis on the Polish contribution. It is often overlooked, and not only in the breaking of the Enigma code. This is partly because Poland ended up at the wrong side of the iron curtain, which was the reason the Dutch government advised against granting the Military Willemsorder to the Polish parachute army for their role during the battle for Arnhem. Only in 2006 this honour was granted by queen Beatrix.

Suggestion: The Navajo Wind/Code Talkers of WW2. They developed a code based on their native language which was unbreakable.

Churchill's response to the request from Bletchly was said to have been a very simple "Give them whatever they want"

Don't forget Tommy Flowers who designed and built Colossus at Bletchley Park. The world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer Colossus would be used to decipher Enigma messages as well as the more complex Lorenz cipher used by German High Command. Tommy Flowers didn't get much recognition after the war. Worth while looking him up. Also what happened to Colossus after the war.

Turing was a genius but few mention Flowers. Flowers was a telecom engineer who built the computers, often using his own money. He struggled after the war and due to Secrets Act could not discuss the great work he did and use it to get work

So glad you gave the Poles and Welchman their due credit.

It always makes my blood boil when I think about how Turing was treated after the war.

One of the best Megaprojects I've ever watched. I cried at the end of The Imitation Game the first time I watched it. The way Mr. Turing was treated by his own country was criminal.

No letter could encrypt as itself ..... that was the most important thing. That bug , changed everything.

Alan Turing is one of my Heroes. I know he didn’t fight as such, but through his Intellect and his great mind, he did save thousands of lives without praise or recognition. Only to be victimised for his sexual orientation.

R.I.P Alan Turing, you were born at the right and the wrong time, you helped save thousands of lives, but would ultimately be condemned by the people you helped.

There is a book called "The Code Book" by Simon Singh, that has some really informational pictures about how the dials work.

Thank you! The contributions of the Polish code breakers is barely mentioned in other stories of the Enigma machine.

To Allen Turing, the inventor of the modern day computer and quite possibly the world's first hacker. RIP and thank you.

1:35 - Chapter 1 - The enigma machine 3:45 - Chapter 2 - Background 4:45 - Chapter 3 - The unbreakable enigma machine 5:35 - Mid roll ads 6:55 - Chapter 4 - The 1st bombes 8:55 - Chapter 5 - Lucky breaks 11:30 - Chapter 6 - The expanding bombes 14:00 - Chapter 7 - Impact on the war 15:55 - Chapter 8 - The human touch

I love all of Simon’s (And his crew) channels. It always astounds me the thoroughness of the topic being presented. They always give credit to the lesser known individuals that play a critical part in whatever topic they instruct on. My children love the videos. Keep up the good work. Simon and his crew deserve a Netflix show.

"Surfshark: better than the Nazis" is a hell of a sales pitch Simon

Lets skirt around the contribution that a British General Post Office engineer made to the effort, Tommy Flowers was instrumental in building the colossus machine. An engineering genius that took in the ideas of Alan Turin and made them reality. As we all know Scientists think of an idea, Engineers make them come true.

Allan Turing will be on the new £50 note that will be released 23 June 2021.

Only alluded to, the longer lasting important impact of Turing and Co. at Bletchley was the development of what is known as 'Network Analyis' - which was the basis for the determination of, among other things, the 'weather messages', and several other obscure, but vitally important pieces to the understanding of German communications, with applications long afterwards, to this very day.

Thank you so much for mentioning Polish contribution.

Many years ago, I read a book about Bletchley Park & the Enigma codebreakers. In it, the author said that they received a full set of drawings & diagrams of a diplomatic Enigma. Unbelievably, the German embassy in Warsaw, on a Friday, posted their machine back to Berlin just before the invasion. Over the weekend, the Poles disassembled the machine, made detailed drawings of it & sent them to the British, knowing they didn't have time to figure out exactly how it worked; the Germans were expecting their machine to arrive in Berlin after all. .

My father taught me about this when I was a kid and I've always found it to be one of the most fascinating yet underappreciated stories from the war.

15:07 "The formidable Bismarck was *finally* sunk..." Simon, I don't think that's the best choice of words for sinking a ship on its first combat patrol.

one has to wonder how much computer science may have advanced if Turing had lived a lot longer.

My grandmother worked as a code breaker for the Waves in the US Navy.

I went to Bletchley Park for a visit, it’s a very interesting day out . I would like to thank all the volunteers especially the tour guides, they make the visit much more enjoyable.

Although Alan Turing is most closely associated with the Enigma Machine, a significant detail left out of this episode was that the machine was designed by the brilliant German engineer Arthur Scherbius. An amazing dude.

Codes and code breakers of WW2 were and are absolutely amazing. As stated, while the enigma machine and the code breakers were pretty amazing the human factor was the real key. Methodically thinking through material and the casual losses of material by the Germans really was the true reason for success at Bletchley park. The code breakers of the Pacific theater provided enough material to give Admiral Nimitz a slight advantage over the Japanese. The intelligence of Nimitz and the skill of the US Navy personnel is what really sank 4 Japanese aircraft carriers in the battle of Midway. The greatest naval victory of all time, was a victory for all of the Americans involved, not just the people who cracked the Japanese messages.The victory at Midway provided the critical element needed to defeat the Japanese, time. The time needed for the ships, that were under construction, to make it into the war in the Pacific. One of the most important contributions to the Allied success in WW2 was the contributions of the Navajo people. The Navajo gave America the unprecedented power of coded messaging that was never decoded. Great video! Yall take care and be safe, John

It's extremely regrettable that we didn't accept those who helped us win the war. Not only Mr. Turing but also African American units and the Native American units that contributed, only to come back to segregation and life on reservations. We can only hope that the following generations appreciate the sacrifices that these men and women made to defeat the Nazis.

There was a very good documentary movie about Gordon Welchman called "The Codebreaker Who Hacked Hitler" on the Smithsonian Channel. Welchman also wrote a book in his last years "Bletchley Park: Code Breakings Forgotten Genius". Welchman was a contemporary and fellow co-worker with Alan Turing. Both were misaligned by their bosses after the war.

Would definitely recommend visiting Bletchley Park and the Computing Museum next door.

One small thing. The German Railways the Reichsbahn also had an enigma network to encrypt the timetables of supply trains to the front and the trains to the concentration camps. Altough easily decoded, the Allies always thought that they were off, since the messages didn't make sense to them. In reality the Reichsbahn had a different vocabulary for internal use and used that in Enigma aswell.

Alan Turing was a war hero who the British Government chemically castrated and he eventually took his own life as a result of the poor treatment he received after being outed as a gay man.

Thank you for treating Mr. Turing so respectfully. A sadly lost genius.

We should create a monument to Alan Turing somewhere in the world. He got shafted and the Allies owe him this. I'm writing this and you're reading this on a computer... thanks to him.

British Commandos: invested effort into breaking the Enigma and solved the headache *70 years later in America Hollywood: Let’s disguise a bunch of American troops as Germans onto a German ship, then let them approach the German sub carrying the Enigma and bag them and get outta there

The tragedy of Turing has been repeated thousands of times through homophobia, racism, xenophobia, transphobia, and so on. How many contributions to society have been sidelined because of the shortsighted fear of the different? How many contributions to society have been LOST? We need the best from everyone.

About 6 years ago I was doing a job in a house in Seaford Rise in South Australia. The owner was a lovely older lady who was nice to talk to. All going well, and then I saw a few photos in a frame, obviously from the war. A cup of tea later I found out she was one of the de-coders at Bletchley! She was saying that all of the (mostly) women never knew what went on in the next room, but all did their job and in fact only later in the war did they truly understand what their work had done. She was 19 when she started. Such an amazing experience to meet her.

I would like to see you do a video on Thomas (Tommy) Harold Flowers the man that designed and built Colossus, the first programmable computer that was used to break the Lorenz cipher. Tommy was an unsung hero of Bletchley Park.

@1:00 a place called Bletchley Park, a place that is about as far away from the sea as you can get. In fact, the actual furthest place from the sea is only a few miles away. So... Why the picture of someone sitting by the sea when you start talking about it?

Drachinifel has a good, more in depth video on the Enigma if anyone's interested.

Great team! Love your presenting Simon and great writing by Olivier. Fantastic production. Watch these straight after business blaze videos. 👌

A single man can't stop a war, but he can certainly START one. What that says about us as a species I do not know.

I've been hearing about British code breaking for decades. Kudos to Alan Turing and his team for doing what they did. What has always been absent from the story however, is any discussion of what the nazis were doing to break allied codes. I saw an interview some years ago, by a former nazi code breaker, who claimed to have done exactly this. Turns out, the nazis were reading a lot of British communications too. See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_code_breaking_in_World_War_II Probably on both sides, people felt so superior at cracking the other guy's code, that they failed to seriously consider it was happening to them. Perhaps we mostly hear about British successes, not failures ... because Germany lost the war.

This was a really well put together video, I had no idea of the polish starting off the work! Thank you for teaching us all

*Revised at 2:30PM CDT 4/17/21* Great video, guys. Even condensed due to time factors, you told this extraordinary tale in a very interesting and informative fashion. If anyone hungers for more of the same, I recommend a documentary, "Breaking the Codes." I had the good fortune to discover both disks of this marvelous title in the discount listings of a paper video catalog (I was unable to afford internet access for five years, due to moving to a more expensive apartment). Originally as two separate videos, they've been reintroduced as a single video, "Breaking the Codes: The Rise of Enigma/The Triumph of the Codebreakers." They cover codebreaking from ancient times through the end of WWII, telling of the colossal mulishness of "Old Boy" politicians and military officers, and the hard work and ingenuity of people in all the Ally Nations. Fascinating. Stay safe, everyone.

Super series!! Keep it up. If reference to Rommel I think an important under reported aspect is Rommel having detailed access to Allied plans. For reference here you might want to look at the book "The Code Breakers" by David Kahn. He details on page 250 (in chapter "Duel in the Ether") how an American military attache in Cairo had had his private code he insisted in using, broken by the Germans, and Rommel had very detailed reports on all the Allied dispositions and intentions - leading to a series of good victories for Rommel and the Germans. Once the attache - Colonel Bonner Frank Fellers - was recalled to Washington to be rewarded for his detailed reports, Rommel started losing. The analysis in the book is detailed and interesting. I beleive the Brits (using Ultra) realized the leak and had the attache recalled.

I saw a documentary movie on this. It still trips me out that Lord Grantham had both of his son in laws working on the enigma machine with a Doctor that was a bit Strange and who’s girlfriend was a pirate.

With hindsight it is remarkable that the germans ended every message with 'that' phrase, giving away 2 vowels and 4 consonants. Coupled with weather report (wetterbericht), a further 3 consonants, that's a lot of information to feed into the cracking machine. (9/26 letters in the alphabet). Of course it still wasn't simple but once they had the machine able to do the patterns, those letters made it 'relatively' easy to quickly decode the german messages.

Love all of your videos and each day look forward to new ones

Absolutely superb condensed narrative of a very complex story. Thank you

It's interesting that today all of us carry an Enigma Machine in their pockets.

I'd like to see you do a video on the ONLY unbroken code from WWII - the Navajo code talkers of the US Marines.

Great video as always. Numberphile also has a great video on the enigma machine.

This is something that's always interested me about WW2, but it's often overlooked. I think that a good follow-up to this video would be something about the Navajo Code Talkers.

YES SIMON more technologically videos please fact boi:)

You just know somewhere out there Hitler was cursing his generals and admirals over this machine

Simon, I enjoy watching all your channels, thank you for the excellent presentation of interesting history and projects from around the world. You have asked for suggestions for megaprojects. I still think it amazing that launch complex 39 at Kennedy Space Centre was constructed in about 2 years, from the VAB to pads 39A and B, the 3 miles of roadway between the two, and the crawler transport machine and mobile launch pads. The launch pads themselves were much more than compacted sand covered with concrete, mazes of plumbing, electronics and communication equipment. And the mobile launchers were more than a box and tower for the Saturn V to sit upon until launch. Perhaps this might make a Megaproject documentary. Best wishes for all your future work.

Suggestion: the Berlin Airlift during the Cold War. Probably the largest, most technically difficult logistics operation in history, and in my opinion, definitely worth a video.

Oringinal breakers of the enigma Code... 3 Polish mathematicians!! NOT UK, but in fact Poland! 🇵🇱 All just to get backstabbed by the allies 🤦🏼‍♂️.. I have heated debates with English citizens who insists Alan Turing is the end all be all when it comes to the enigma machine... I just laugh and try to set the record straight, but then Brits are a stubborn bunch! Wanting to take credit for every single thing!! Dziękuje Polska! 🇵🇱

Thank you for this type of education, as important as financial education!

Simon has this way of almost apologizing on behalf of others. It's like he's the voice for the unsung heroes such as Alan Turing. He makes you feel almost guilty and proud at the same time. It's incredible his gift. My favorite one is when he did the video on the challenge. That one hit me hard. Thank you Simon and your team for all the wonderful content and happiness you bring to me and everyone who watches.

Hey Simon! Thanks for providing so much wonderful educational content for me to binge while I work.

Need a follow up on Lorenz and Colossus please!

Megaprojects suggestion: Buran-Energia.

From years ago, this has been one of the most FASCINATING things that I have ever heard of.

Once again another great story thanks to you and your team

Polish matematicians broke the code of enigma 💪

I take it, that’s the door you walked into?😂😂😂

You put so much good information in your documentaries. Thank You once again.

Mathematics is truly fascinating in the world of computers. We have crazy amounts of computing powers today.

Truly incredible that this was all achieved with pure, boundless human intelligence and problem solving ability. The treatment of Turing by my government was an abomination; the man was a hero through and through.

Almost forgot Simon as a refined, collected, mature human being was a thing

Wow ! Great subject, I have always been interested in the Enigma Machines. Thanks for this Megaproject

Megaprojects was my first WhistlerTube channel. But it was the OGBB that made me fall in love.

Here early I think I'm starting to get these upload times subconsciously 😂

enigma machine: nobody can understand me woman on her best day ever: rookie

Actually, one of your best. Thank you.

Alan Turing is one of my personal heroes. Just received a Conway Stewart Turing-Welchman Pen. Thanks for this video!

3:10 A to Zee? ZEE!?!?! Hand back the English card mate. It is a ZED! Zer Eh Der.

One can only imagine how much more he could have contributed to math and cryptography if people weren’t so damn homophobic.

There is a certain irony in the tale of the select group of Polish mathematicians who went to Berlin university to learn the skills to break the Enigma code. There is also a story that Churchill, after visiting Bletchley Park and meeting some of the 'interesting' and 'unique' individuals working there, commented to the Chief that "when I said to leave no stone unturned to get the right people, I didn't expect to be taken literally."

I already know too many nerdy details about enigma cipher and the enigma machine, but of course I'm going to watch Simon talk about it!

fun fact: Pyry in polish means Potatoes ;) same as ziemniaki, kartofle ;).

The British Radar installation of WW2 would be a great MegaProject as well.

7:58 those dimensions seem spookily similar to my first laptop!

Wow! Thank you Simon! Would you be able to do a megaprojects on the something like computer encryption like SHA256 or MD5 ? Since is pretty much apart of everyday life sort of like GPS.

I highly recommend "the imitation game" an amazing movie based on this !

I'm surprised you didn't plug your Alan Turing video on Biographics...

Fantastic video, with information I had not seen before.

Much awaited and deserved video

Who in their right mind disliked this video?? 🙄

Back in the early 90's, some friends and I were tripping balls on acid when we sat down and devised a crazy method of encoding written text. We did it all on paper with pencils and a calculator. We started by assigning a random number to each letter in the alphabet, but we didn't limit it to 1-26. We gave each letter a random value between 1 and 500. We then came up with some crazy formula that we ran the values of each letter through and it would give us the value of the letter replacing the original. Because of the weird-ass way it worked, many words would come out with more letters than the original and we had a number next to each encoded word to indicate the number of letters in the original word. For example, the word "Light", when encoded, is "Phips-5". This number would also be used in the formula to decode the word. Some words still had the same amount of letters, but you still needed the number to decode it. One of my friends still has that shit written down after all these years, lol. We look back on it sometimes and wonder how the hell we came up with a working code like that while trippin' face.

3:30 - High ranking officials did not use the Enigma machine to send messages. They used a Lorenz Cipher which is even harder to crack.

Will never not chuckle at the fact that Britain was like “I know you were a massive part of our success in the war, but you’re gay, sooooo”

Megaprojects topic suggestion. US NATO installations in Europe. The spending to build the facilities, both mission focused and support, especially during the 80s was massive.

One of your best segues, good job, Mr. Whistler, et al.

Turring has a smug grin permanently glued to his face