by Val Ross
Scherbius died in 1929, but his Enigma kept evolving. For later models the designers added more disks, and other refinements that swapped the letters around even more. With 1,305,093,289,500 possible combinations, the Enigma seemed to Germany’s top officers to be invincible. They ordered thirty thousand of the machines as they prepared to march across Europe and into World War II.
But they hadn’t counted on two brilliant mathematicians: a slim Polish man in glasses, Marian Rejewski, and a shaggy Englishman, Alan Turing. These two nerds didn’t carry guns or fly bomber planes, but they played a crucial role in the defeat of Enigma and, ultimately, the Nazis.
Rejewski’s breakthrough came first. In the 1930s, working for the Polish Cipher Bureau, he noticed that the Germans put the day key (in code, mind you) at the top of the first messages of the day. He also noticed other patterns in Enigma’s chains of letters, and realized they were the unique products of the day’s settings for the scramblers. So he catalogued all the possible scrambler settings. The job took many months, but eventually allowed him to look up the patterns and identify likely scrambler settings.
Then, around 1938, the Enigma designers suddenly increased the number of scrambler disks, raising the number of possible combinations into the millions of trillions. The Poles knew that their country was in danger, and that decoding would now require more resources than they had at their disposal. They took their replicas of Enigma machines and smuggled them to England. Just in time; in September 1939, Nazi tanks rolled into Poland. Marian Rejewski escaped through Romania, to France and then to England. The war had begun.
The English, meanwhile, had set up a top-secret decoding headquarters in Bletchley Park, a manor house deep in the green English countryside. There they assembled a strange assortment of brainy men and women: mathematicians, people who studied languages, all the British chess grandmasters, people who were very fast at solving crossword puzzles. Perhaps because Rejewski was from a country now occupied by Germans, the British did not trust him enough to invite him to Bletchley. The brilliant cryptographer was in effect denied access, and spent the war working at a low-level job in London.
Luckily for the English, they had their own mathematicians, many of them from Cambridge University, One was Alan Turing. In the 1930s, while Rejewski was breaking the early Enigma codes, Turing had been writing his PhD thesis on machines that could theoretically be designed to carry out problems in logic, such as recognizing patterns among “computable numbers” or, for that matter, chess moves – or coded messages. The British government assigned Turing to design a version of this machine for Bletchley Park.
Even among Bletchley’s mad scientists, Turing stood out: messy and absent-minded, he had a high, shrill laugh. He loved Disney’s movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Sometimes, when he bicycled to work at the manor house, he wore a gas mask because of his hay fever. But his “Turing machines,” or “bombes” – walls of clattering wheels that scanned spinning tape – did the trick. Like an electronic version of Rejewski’s catalogues, they could check out twenty possible Enigma settings per second. On good days, the Bletchley team would figure out the day key within an hour of receiving the first intercepted German message.
By the middle of the war, the British were reading most German communications: which ships the submarines were going to attack, what troops were moving where. One British commander estimated that without the work at Bletchley Park, the war in Europe would have dragged on until 1948, instead of ending in 1945.
But the end of the war only brought increasing suspicion and fear between Communist countries and Western countries. Then, in 1949, Soviet Russia exploded an atomic bomb. The West was horrified that this potential enemy had grown so dangerous, and the international mood of suspicion turned into the bristling hostility of the Cold War.
Although the first true American computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator, or ENIAC, wasn’t finished until 1945, the United States had emerged from the war as the most powerful and richest nation on Earth. It had taken over as world leader in developing computers – and in deciding who would work on them. In 1951 several Cambridge University men who had worked for British intelligence in the war were unmasked as Soviet spies. Turing had never been a spy, but he had gone to Cambridge. He had the wrong friends. In 1952 word got out that he was homosexual, and under the laws of the time this made him a criminal He was humiliated – but worse was to come. He was told he could no longer work on secret decoding projects.
Alan Turing committed suicide in 1954. He did it by eating a poisoned apple – an idea he took from the movie Snow White. But his electronic brainchildren, the machines that could think, kept growing and changing.
Financed largely by the U.S. Defense Department, computer designers began to develop machines that could not only solve problems but could “talk” to each other in a network. The Defense Department set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which by 1969 brought on line a network of computers from the military world, big business, universities, and libraries, all sharing information. The designers deliberately made this system as decentralized as possible, with all kinds of electronic pathways, so that if one part of the net was attacked, the computers could keep sharing information by other routes. In those days this network was known as the ARPANet. Today we call it the Internet, and it is as close as humankind has yet come to a giant public library, a vast treasure trove of reading.
Though he became famous as a brilliant mathematician, Alan Mathison Turing had a rocky time at school, where he floundered in English and was criticized by his teachers for handing in messy assignments. Still, he won most of his schools math prizes.
Of course, there are times when computer information is not accessible. You can lose your password. You can be denied access to Internet sites. People who disagree with governments in China or Saudi Arabia are used to seeing messages on their screens like “Server down” or “Website not found.”
But when people really want to read something, they can be patient and systematic, like Marian Rejewski and Alan Turing. They try different routes, different patterns, different passwords. They know that, given the power of human curiosity, the breadth of human ingenuity, and the power of human resolve, it has been pointless, so far, to tell people, “You can’t read this.”
Source Notes
Introduction
A version of the story of Tarquin and the Sibyl can be found in A History of Reading, by Alberto Manguel (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). The story of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice can be seen in the film Fantasia (Disney Studios, 1940). A version of it is told in Folklore and Book Culture, by Kevin Hayes (University of Tennessee Press, 1997).
1: The First Readers
For life in Ur see Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, by Jean Bottero (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), and Sumer and the Sumerians, by Harriet Crawford (Cambridge University Press, 1991). For En-hedu-anna see A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now, by Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone (Schocken Books, 1992), A History of Reading, by Stephen Fischer (Reaktion Books, 2003), and A History of Reading, by Manguel My version of her hymn is adapted from The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, by J A. Black, G. Cunningham, E. Robson, and G. Zolyomi (Oxford, 1998).
2: Language Lost and Language Found
For the story of Arthur Evans see The Find of a Lifetime, by Sylvia Horwitz (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), and Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth (Hill and Wang, 2000), by J. Alexander MacGillivray. The above books touch on Michael Ventris’s work. For a fuller description see The Code Book: The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography, by Simon Singh (Doubleday, 1999).
3: The Poet and the Emperor
A good biography is Nero, by Richard Holland (Sutton, 2000). For the story of Lucan see chapter 9 in Ambitiosa Mors: Suicide and Self in Roman Thought and Literature, by Timothy Hill (Routledge, 2004), and the General Introduction of
Lucan: Pharsalia, translated and edited by Jane Wilson Joyce (Cornell University Press, 1993).
4: The Made-to-Order Alphabet
The name of the monk Gorioun is sometimes spelled Koriun or Koryun. The name of Mesrob is sometimes spelled Mesrop. For Mesrob’s story see The Armenian People from Ancient Times to Modern, Vol I, by Richard Hovanissian (St. Martin’s Press, 1997), and Mesrop Mashtots, by E.B. Aghayan (Yerevan University Press, 1986); the quote about Mesrob’s vision is on page 37 of the latter, attributed to the monk Moses Khorenatsi. For background on Edessa see From the Holy Mountain, by William Dalrymple (HarperCollins, 1997). Thanks to Professor Ed Safarian for the anecdote about his son, the artist Paul Safarían.
5: The Prayerful Pagodas
For more about Shotoku (also known as Koken) see The Chrysanthemum Throne: A History of Emperors of Japan, by Peter Martin (Sutton, 1997). For more on the darani project see The History of Japanese Printing and Book Illustration, by David Chibbett (Kodansha International, 1977), and A History of Reading, by Fischer.
6: The Stolen Story
The incident of the Genji manuscript theft can be found in Murasaki Shikibu: Her Diary and Poetic Memoirs: A Translation and Study, by Richard Bowring (Princeton University Press, 1982). See also A Woman’s Weapon: Spirit Possession in The Tale of Genji, by Doris Bargen (University of Hawaii Press, 1997), and The Force of Women in Japanese History, by Mary Beard (Foreign Affairs Press, 1953). A fictionalized version of Lady Murasaki’s life (and the incident of the manuscript theft) can be found in The Tale of Murasaki, by Liza Dalby (Nan Talese, Random House, 2000).
7: The Pillage of Baghdad
The descriptions of Baghdad before and after Hulagu, and the quoted description from Anwari, come from The Story of Civilization: Vol IV, The Age of Faith, by Will and Ariel Durant (Simon & Schuster, 1950). The quote “Hardly ever has Islam…” is from Early Mongol Rule in 13th Century Iran: A Persian Renaissance, by George Lane (Routledge, Curzon, 2003). A good account of Genghis Khan and his grandsons appears in The Mongol Warlords, by David Nicolle (G.E. Lane, 1990). Details about the pillage of the great library in Alexandria and the destruction of Baghdad’s libraries come from A History of Libraries in the Western World, by Michael D. Harris (Scarecrow Press, 1999).
8: Giving Books to the People
Sejong is sometimes spelled Seijong. Hangul is sometimes spelled Hankul. Confucius is sometimes spelled K’ung-fu-tzu. For the story of young Sejong see King Seijong The Great, by Chan Cho Hyon Pae (King Seijong Memorial Society, 1970), and A History of Korea, by Roger Tennant (Kegan Paul, 1996). For Confucian opposition to Hangul see A Sourcebook of Korean Civilization, by Peter Lee (Columbia University Press, 1993). For Sejong’s motivations in creating Hangul see King Sejong the Great: The Light of 15th-century Korea, edited by Young-Key Kim Renaud (George Washington University Press, 1992). For Gutenberg see The Gutenberg Revolution, by John Man (Headline Publishing, Hodder Headline, 2002), and Gutenberg: Man of the Millennium, by a writing team headed by Peter Krawietz (Verlag Hermann Schmidt, Mainz, 2000).
9: Darkness upon the Deep
For details about Luther’s books, Peter Schoeffer’s meeting with Tyndale, book smuggling, and Tyndale’s comments on Hebrew, see God’s Bestseller: William Tyndale, Thomas More, and the Writing of the English Bible – A Story of Martyrdom and Betrayal, by Brian Moynahan (St. Martin’s Press, 2002). For Cochlaeus’s encounter with Tyndale’s publishing venture, Anne Boleyn’s interest in Tyndale, and Phillips’s betrayal of Tyndale, see William Tyndale, by C.H. Williams (Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1969). For Tyndale’s contribution to the English language see A History of Reading, by Manguel.
10: The Cousins and the Code
For a good retelling of Claude Nau and the messages smuggled in beer barrels see Mary Queen of Scots, by Antonia Fraser (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969). For Tom Phelippes’s forgery and code-cracking see also The Code Book, by Singh.
11: Books Not to be Read
For stories of Eirikur, Bogi, Magnus, and the Black School, see Folklore and Book Culture, by Hayes. For the Index Librorum Prohibitorum see 100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature, by Nicholas Karolides, Margaret Bald, and Dawn B. Sova (Checkmate Books/Facts on File, 1999). For the censoring of Albertus Magnus and Harry Potter see Nihil Obstat: Catalogue for an exhibition of banned, censored and challenged books in the West, 1491-2000, by Pearce J. Carefoote, introduction by Alberto Manguel (Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, 2005).
12: That Dreadful Mr. Shakespeare
For Newbery’s bookshop and the world of early children’s books (including Anna Laetitia Barbauld), and for the lives of Charles and Mary Lamb, see Mad Mary Lamb, by Susan Tyler Hitchcock (W.W. Norton and Co., 2005). For the Bowdlers see Dr. Bowdlers Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America, by Noel Perrin (Atheneum, 1969). For Thomas Bowdler’s writings in The British Critic and Harriet Bowdler’s Sermons on the Doctrines and Duties of Christianity see the British Library in London (not many people read Harriet these days – the pages of the edition I read were uncut, which means I was the first person in more than 150 years to read them!)
13: A Book at His Fingertips
For the story of Louis Braille’s childhood and family life see Louis Braille, by Beverley Birch (Gareth Stevens Children’s Books, 1989). For Braille’s education see also The Life and Work of Louis Braille 1809-1852, by Pierre Henri (South African National Council for the Blind, 1987). For the fate of Braille’s hands and the state of Braille today I am indebted to Darken Bogart, past president of the International Council of English Braille, and also to the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.
14: Freddy the Slave Boy
For the early life of Frederick Douglass and how he learned to read see My Bondage and My Freedom, Part 1, by Frederick Douglass (Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1855), and Young Frederick Douglass, by Dickson J. Preston (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). For laws against slaves learning to read see When I Can Read M31 Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery and Religion in the Antebellum South, by Janet Duitsman Cornelius (University of South Carolina Press, 1991). For Douglass’s name change, comments on his career as an orator, his statement at Seneca Falls, and his support for women’s suffrage, see Frederick Douglass and the Fight for Freedom, by Douglas X Miller (Facts on File Publications, 1988).
15: The Two-Faced Treaty
For a good discussion of differing concepts in the Maori and English versions of the treaty see The Illustrated History of the Treaty of Waitangi, by Claudia Orange (Bridget Williams Books, 2004). This book is also very good for details about the celebrations and subsequent problems over land sales, fishing and mining rights, etc. For details of Hone Heke’s acts of rebellion, John Somes’s quote, and the Northern War, see The Maori and the Crown, by Dora Alves (Greenwood Press, 1999). For the evolution of the treaty from the nineteenth century until the end of the twentieth see Trick or Treaty?: The Treaty of Waitangi, by Douglas Graham (Institute for Policy Studies, New Zealand, 1997).
16: The Evil World of Comic Books?
For the early days of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and for the best overview of the industry, see Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book, by Gerard Jones (Basic Books, 2004). For more on Fredric Wertham see Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code, by Amy Kiste Nyberg (University Press of Mississippi, 1998). For Hitler’s hatred of Superman see “Flying Up and Flying Down: The Rise and Fall of the American Superhero,” Harper’s Magazine, August 2004. For the Depression and the rise of comic books see Censure et Bande Dessinée Américaine, by Marc Jetté (Roussan, 1997). For Bill Gaines versus Fredric Wertham, horror/vampire comics, and the birth of Mad Magazine, see Completely Mad: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine, by Maria Reidelbach (Little, Brown, 1991).
17: Days of the Taliban
For a history of late-twentieth-century Afghanistan, the rise of the Taliban, and details about the fall of Kabul, see Ghost Wars: The Sec
ret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, by Steve Coll (Penguin, 2004). For the story of Gower Shad (sometimes spelled Gohar Shad) see The Road to Oxiana, by Robert Byron (Macmillan, 1939). I have adapted a poem by Hakim Jami found in A Golden Treasury of Persian Poetry, translated by Hadi Hassan (Indian Council for Cultural Relations, 1966). For details about girls learning to read under the Taliban, see The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage through Afghanistan, by Christina Lamb (HarperCollins, 2002), and Sally Armstrong’s Chatelaine Magazine articles (“First Class” and other reports on women in Afghanistan, in 2002 and 2003), and Veiled Threat: The Hidden Power of the Women of Afghanistan, by Sally Armstrong (Penguin, 2002). I am indebted to Sally Armstrong, Adeena Niazi, and Dr. Sima Samar for putting me in touch with Afghan women who wish to remain nameless and who told me their stories; Nelofer is a composite of several of them. See also the excellent children’s novels on Afghanistan by Deborah Ellis, The Breadwinner (Groundwood, 2000) and Parvana’s Journey (Groundwood, 2002).
