Iconic Machines

PURPLE

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    Volumes

    1. Vol 1 PURPLE — Volume 1 — PURPLE — The Machine Nobody Saw What Japan's Type 97 diplomatic cipher machine was, why it was built from telephone stepping switches instead of rotors, how a small U.S. Army team rebuilt it in 1940 from intercepted messages alone, and what reading it meant from Pearl Harbor to Normandy — the orientation volume for the twelve-part series
    2. Vol 2 PURPLE — Volume 2 — Before PURPLE — Japan's Codes, Yardley's Black Chamber and the Naval Treaty How America's first peacetime codebreakers read Japan's telegrams through the Washington Naval Conference, why the bureau was shut in 1929, what the U.S. Navy took from a Japanese safe, and how a best-selling memoir pushed Tokyo toward cipher machines
    3. Vol 3 PURPLE — Volume 3 — RED — The Type 91 Machine and Its Break A half-rotor, a break wheel of forty-seven teeth and a split alphabet: the Foreign Ministry's first cipher machine, and how American, British and Navy analysts took it apart
    4. Vol 4 PURPLE — Volume 4 — Inside the Type 97 — Sixes, Twenties and Stepping Switches Four telephone stepping switches, two plugboards and a stepping rule: how the Foreign Ministry's Type B machine enciphered, traced through the wiring tables that SIS recovered without ever seeing one
    5. Vol 5 PURPLE — Volume 5 — The Break — Friedman, Rowlett, Grotjan and 20 September 1940 Eighteen months against a machine nobody had seen: the quick fall of the sixes, the long wall of the twenties, the six messages in indicator 59173, a Friday afternoon in September 1940, a copy built from telephone switches for $684.65 — and what the effort cost the man in charge
    6. Vol 6 PURPLE — Volume 6 — MAGIC — Analogs, Translators and the Mission to Bletchley What happened once the machine could be read: generals at the switchboard, copies built at the Navy Yard, a PURPLE analog carried to Bletchley Park on a new battleship in January 1941, the Army–Navy arrangements for who read what, the translators who were always too few, and the ten people allowed to see the result
    7. Vol 7 PURPLE — Volume 7 — Pearl Harbor and the Fourteen-Part Message What the PURPLE decrypts of 6 and 7 December 1941 said, who read them and when, how a warning written at noon in Washington reached Hawaii hours after the bombs, and why the most famous intercept in American history never named a target — with the documented record set against the revisionist case
    8. Vol 8 PURPLE — Volume 8 — Oshima's Window — Reading Berlin from Washington How the Japanese ambassador to Nazi Germany, a general who had known Hitler since 1935, became through his PURPLE telegrams the Allies' best informant on the Third Reich: Barbarossa, Ribbentrop's promise, the Atlantic Wall, the run-up to D-Day and the collapse of 1945 — and what became of him
    9. Vol 9 PURPLE — Volume 9 — What Survived — The Berlin Fragment, CORAL, JADE and the Legacy What is left of a machine its owners smashed: the stepping-switch assembly dug out of the Japanese embassy in Berlin, the captured JADE from Saipan, the American analogs that outlived the original, PURPLE's naval cousins CORAL and JADE and how they were broken, and the long road from a 1940 break to public knowledge, published reconstructions and working simulators
    10. Vol 10 PURPLE — Volume 10 — Building a PURPLE — Design No kit exists, so this is a design: seven telephone uniselectors, a two-conductor plugboard, a small controller that only decides which magnet to pulse, and a fallback that needs no switches at all
    11. Vol 11 PURPLE — Volume 11 — Building a PURPLE — Wiring, Controller and Verification From the wiring tables to 1,650 soldered straps, a line interface that runs the cipher path both ways, a controller that only chooses which magnet to pulse, and the test that proves the machine reads the Pearl Harbor message
    12. Vol 12 PURPLE — Volume 12 — Running PURPLE — Keys, Procedures and a Message Worked in Full How a Japanese code clerk keyed the Type 97 in December 1941, how the Americans read the same key, and Part 1 of the 14-part message taken from its indicator group to its English text — then a new message enciphered the 1941 way