Iconic Machines

Lorenz and Colossus

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    Volumes

    1. Vol 1 Lorenz and Colossus — Volume 1 — Tunny and Colossus — The Codebreaking Machine Nobody Was Told About A twelve-wheeled German cipher attachment that carried Hitler's High Command traffic, the handful of British mathematicians who reconstructed it from its output alone, and the valve-filled machine built to break it at speed — then dismantled, sworn to silence and forgotten for thirty years — the orientation volume for the fourteen-part series
    2. Vol 2 Lorenz and Colossus — Volume 2 — Teleprinters, Baudot and Vernam — The Cipher That Adds Émile Baudot's five-key telegraph, Donald Murray's typewriter and paper tape, the international alphabet of thirty-two characters, and Gilbert Vernam's 1917 discovery that a teleprinter could encipher itself by adding a key tape impulse by impulse — perfect when the key is never repeated, and the root of every weakness Bletchley Park exploited when it was
    3. Vol 3 Lorenz and Colossus — Volume 3 — The Lorenz SZ40/42 — Twelve Wheels, Chi, Psi and Mu Inside the cipher attachment: twelve pin wheels and their 501 cams, the regular chi wheels and the stuttering psi wheels, the two motor wheels that decide when the psis move, the limitations the SZ42 added, and twenty letters worked through the machine one step at a time
    4. Vol 4 Lorenz and Colossus — Volume 4 — The Depth of 30 August 1941 — Tiltman's Break Strange new signals on the air, an indicator spelt out in German first names, and the day a German operator sent a four-thousand-character message twice on the same settings — not quite word for word — giving John Tiltman ten days of work and Bletchley Park nearly four thousand characters of the key that would reveal the Lorenz machine
    5. Vol 5 Lorenz and Colossus — Volume 5 — Bill Tutte — Deducing a Machine from Its Output A gardener's son from Newmarket, a Cambridge chemist who squared the square, writes four thousand characters of enemy key out by hand in rows of 575, notices a diagonal, and finds the 41-character cycle of a wheel nobody had seen — then, a year later, invents the statistical method that Colossus was built to run
    6. Vol 6 Lorenz and Colossus — Volume 6 — The Testery — Breaking Tunny by Hand Major Ralph Tester's section, from four German speakers in July 1942 to 118 people on three shifts in 1945: depths, cribs, padding sentences and Turing's pencil-and-eraser method; the October 1942 indicator change that nearly shut them out; the limitations that made the plain text drive the machine; and the long partnership with Newman's machines, in which Colossus set the chi wheels and the Testery finished the job by hand
    7. Vol 7 Lorenz and Colossus — Volume 7 — Max Newman and Heath Robinson A Cambridge topologist who had taught Turing logic, a statistical attack that would take years by hand, and the clattering two-tape machine — named after a cartoonist — that proved a machine could do it in hours
    8. Vol 8 Lorenz and Colossus — Volume 8 — Tommy Flowers and the Building of Colossus A Post Office engineer who trusted valves when no one else did, a machine Bletchley Park did not order, eleven months at Dollis Hill, and the race to have a second, faster Colossus working before the invasion of France
    9. Vol 9 Lorenz and Colossus — Volume 9 — How Colossus Worked — Tapes, Valves, Counters and the 1+2 Break-In One loop of paper tape, a clock taken from its sprocket holes, twelve rings of thyratrons standing in for Lorenz wheels, a switch panel for the Boolean test, five counters and a typewriter — and Tutte's statistic followed through the machine, with a real SZ42 message run through this series' own software
    10. Vol 10 Lorenz and Colossus — Volume 10 — Fish at War — Tunny Links, Sturgeon and D-Day The radio teleprinter network that carried the German high command's orders to its army groups, the Kent farm where it was taken down as ink on paper, the other 'Fish' machine that was not a Lorenz at all, and what the decrypts said about Kursk and Normandy
    11. Vol 11 Lorenz and Colossus — Volume 11 — Secrecy, Destruction and the Rebuild — From 1945 to Tony Sale's Colossus Machines broken up on Churchill's order, two that ran on in secret until 1960, thirty years of silence, the historian who started asking, and the fourteen-year rebuild that put a working Colossus back in Block H
    12. Vol 12 Lorenz and Colossus — Volume 12 — Building a Lorenz — The SZ42 Replica, Design Twelve wheels and 501 cams in electronics: a design brief, a block diagram, a wheel module that can be turned by hand, a front panel in the machine's own order, the firmware that steps the wheels exactly as the SZ42 did, and the parts to build it
    13. Vol 13 Lorenz and Colossus — Volume 13 — Building a Lorenz — Construction and a Message Sent Wiring the twelve wheel modules, an isolated current loop for a real teleprinter, bring-up one wheel at a time, a verification procedure built on Tiltman's 1961 example and three real SZ42 messages from 2007, and a test message enciphered on the Bream wheels of April 1944, sent and read back
    14. Vol 14 Lorenz and Colossus — Volume 14 — A Colossus on the Bench — Running Tutte's Statistic A paper-tape reader that clocks itself from the sprocket holes, a microcontroller or FPGA that counts Tutte's 1+2 statistic over all 1,271 chi1/chi2 settings, and a demonstration in which the count finds the chi wheels of a real SZ42 message from 2007 and of a message enciphered on the replica