The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

There were too many Germans using too many Enigmas with too many shifting keys to ever recover the keys by hand, so codebreakers needed to build machines of their own to assault the enemy’s machines, giant electro-mechanical contraptions and some of the first digital computers, too. Automation. Polish codebreakers were the first to solve Enigmas and automate the process of recovering keys. They built “bombes” that mirrored the Enigma rotors, ticking through possible alphabets until they found ones that might fit. Later, the British mathematician Alan Turing discovered how to make bombes dramatically more powerful, based on mathematical principles and previously solved bits of text known as “cribs”—a crib might be the name of a Nazi officer, the time of day, or “Heil Hitler.” His solutions were essentially search algorithms, ancestors of the Internet search algorithms of today. Turing’s biographer calls these “search engines for the keys to the Reich.” It was anti-Nazi Google.