The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Balanchine reached Manhattan in October that year. It was a bleak time for such a radical venture. The depression was at its deepest, and the arts were expected to be relevant, or at least not to add to people’s troubles by being costly and apparently wasteful. It had been Kirstein’s intention to set up the company in a quiet backwater in Connecticut, where Balanchine could begin training the dancers. Balanchine would have none of it. He was a city man through and through, equally at home in Saint Petersburg, Paris, and London. He had never heard of the small town Kirstein had in mind and said he would rather return to Europe than ‘lose myself in this Hartford place.’33 Kirstein therefore found a classroom in an old building on Madison Avenue at Fifty-ninth Street. The School of American Ballet opened on 1 January 1934. Twenty-five were accepted as pupils, all but three females. The young Americans were in for a shock. Normally, dance directors never laid a finger on their students, but Balanchine was forever ‘whacking, pushing, tugging, touching, poking.’34 In this way he made them do things they had never thought possible.

  Balanchine’s first ballet in the New World, performed on 10 June 1934, was Serenade, which immediately became a classic.35 As an instinctive showman he realised that to work, and work well, his first ballet had to be about dance itself and about America. He needed to show American audiences that for all its classical heritage, ballet is an ever-changing, contemporary, relevant art, not a static thing, not just Giselle or The Nutcracker. So Balanchine improvised. ‘The first evening he worked on it, seventeen young women were present, so he choreographed the opening scene for seventeen. At one point, a woman fell down and cried – that became a step. On another evening several dancers were late, so that too became part of the ballet.’36 The story within the story in Serenade is about how young, inexperienced dancers achieve mastery of their craft, and how, in a wider sense, they are refined and dignified in the process. He was showing the ennobling powers of art, and why therefore it was necessary to have a ballet company in the first place.37 For Edward Denby, the ballet critic, the crux of Serenade was the ‘sweetness’ of the bond between all the young dancers. Americans, Denby felt, were not like Russians, who had ballet in their very bones. Americans came from a more individualistic, rational, less emotional culture, with less of a shared heritage. Feeling could, therefore, be created by membership of the company instead. This, Denby said, was the basis for Balanchine’s controversial approach – which he always stuck to – that in modern dance the company is more important than any individual dancer; that there should be no stars.38

  Serenade was initially performed before a private, ‘invitation only’ audience. The lawn where the stage was erected ‘never recovered from the shock.’39 The first public performances were given in a two-week season at the Adelphi Theater, beginning 1 March 1935. The company, which comprised twenty-six dancers from the school plus two guest artists – Tamara Geva (Balanchine’s first wife) and Paul Haakon – was called American Ballet.40 The ballets danced included Serenade, Reminiscences, and Transcendence. Kirstein was naturally thrilled that his venture across the Atlantic had paid off so handsomely and so soon. On the first night, however, Balanchine was more circumspect, and he was right. Acceptance would take a while. The following day, in the New York Times, the paper’s dance critic, John Martin, singled out Balanchine as ‘precious and decadent,’ an example of the kind of ‘Riviera aesthetics’ that America could do without (a crack at Scott Fitzgerald and Bertolt Brecht). The best thing for American Ballet, he advised, would be to jettison Balanchine, ‘with his international notions,’ and replace him with ‘a good American dance man.’ But this was ballet, not musicals, and mercifully no one listened.

  One measure of Hitler’s gift arrived in the form of the Benjamin Franklin lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, delivered in the spring of 1952, in which all the speakers were exiles. Franz Neumann spoke on the social sciences, Henri Peyre on the study of literature, Erwin Panofsky on the history of art, Wolfgang Kohler on scientists, and Paul Tillich entitled his talk ‘The Conquest of Theological Provincialism.’ His use of the word conquest was optimistic, but he ended by posing a question that remains remarkably vivid even today: ‘Will America remain what it has become to us [exiles], a country in which people from every country can overcome their spiritual provincialism? One can be both a world power politically and a provincial people spiritually.’41

  20

  COLOSSUS

  Britain declared war on Germany on a Sunday, the morning of 3 September 1939. It was a balmy day in Berlin. William Shirer, the American newspaperman who later wrote a vivid history of the rise and fall of the Third Reich, reported that the city streets were calm, but the faces of Berliners registered ‘astonishment, depression.’ Before lunch he had drinks at the Adlon Hotel with about a dozen members of the British embassy. ‘They seemed completely unmoved by events. They talked about dogs and such stuff.’

  Others were required to show a greater sense of urgency. The very next day, Monday 4 September, Alan Turing reported to the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire.1 Bletchley town was an unlovely part of England, not far from the mud and dust of the county’s famous brickfields. It did, however, have one advantage: it was equidistant from London, Cambridge, and Oxford, the heart of intellectual Britain, and at Bletchley station the railway from London to the north crossed the local line that linked Oxford with Cambridge. North of the station, on an insignificant rise, stood Bletchley Park. In the early years of war, Bletchley’s population was swollen by two very different kinds of stranger. One kind was children, hundreds of them, evacuated from East London mainly, a precaution against the bombing that became known as the Blitz. The second kind was people like Turing, though it was never explained to the locals who these people actually were and what they were doing.2 Life at Bletchley Park was so secret that the locals took against these ‘do-nothings’ and asked their local MP to table a question in Parliament. He was firmly dissuaded from doing so.3 Turing, a shy, unsophisticated man with dark hair that lay very flat on his head, found a room over a pub, the Crown, in a village about three miles away. Even though he helped in the bar when he could, the landlady made no secret of the fact that she didn’t see why an able-bodied young man like Turing shouldn’t be in the army.

  In a sense, Bletchley Park had already been at war for a year when Turing arrived. In 1938 a young Polish engineer called Robert Lewinski had slipped into the British embassy in Warsaw and told the chief of military intelligence there that he had worked in Germany in a factory which made code-signalling machines. He also said he had a near-photographic memory, and could remember the details of the machine, the Enigma. The British believed him and smuggled Lewinski to Paris, where he was indeed able to help build a machine.4 This was the first break the British had in the secret war of codes. They knew that Enigma was used to send orders to military commanders both on land and at sea. But this was the first chance anyone had had to see it close up.

  It turned out that the machine was extremely simple, but its codes were virtually unbreakable.5 In essence it looked like a typewriter with parts added on. The person sending the message simply typed what he or she had to say, in plain German, having first set a special key to one of a number of pointers. A series of rotor arms then scrambled the message as it was sent. At the other end, a similar machine received the message and, provided it was set to the same key, the message was automatically decoded. All personnel operating the machines were issued with a booklet indicating which key setting was to be used on which day. The rotors enabled billions of permutations. Since the key was changed three times a day, with the Germans transmitting thousands of messages in any twenty-four-hour period, the British were faced with a seemingly impossible task. The story of how the Enigma was cracked was a close secret for many years, and certainly one of the most dramatic intellectual adventures of the century. It also had highly pertinent long-term consequences – not only for the course of World War II
but for the development of computers.

  Turing was a key player here. Born in 1912, he had a father who worked in the Indian civil service, and the boy was sent to boarding school, where he suffered considerable psychological damage. His experience at school brought on a stutter and induced in him an eccentricity that probably contributed to his suicide some years later. He discovered in traumatic circumstances that he was homosexual, falling in love with another pupil who died from tuberculosis. Yet Turing’s brilliance at mathematics shone through, and in October 1931 he took up a scholarship at King’s College, Cambridge. This was the Cambridge of John Maynard Keynes, Arthur Eddington, James Chadwick, the Leavises, and George Hardy, another brilliant mathematician, so that intellectually at least Turing felt comfortable. His arrival in Cambridge also coincided with publication of Kurt Gödel’s famous theorem: it was an exciting time in mathematics, and with so much ferment in Germany, people like Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, and Richard Courant, from Göttingen, all passed through.6 Turing duly graduated with distinction as a wrangler, was elected to a fellowship at King’s, and immediately set about trying to take maths beyond Gödel. The specific problem he set himself was this: What was a computable number, and how was it calculated? To Turing, calculation was so logical, so straightforward, so independent of psychology, that it could even be followed by a machine. He therefore set about trying to describe what properties such a machine would have.

  His solution had distinct echoes of Gödel’s theorem. Turing theorised first a machine that could find the number of ‘factors’ in an integer – that is, the prime numbers it is divisible by. In his account of Turing, Paul Strathern quotes a familiar example as follows:7

  180 ÷ 2 = 90

  90 ÷ 2 = 45

  45 ÷ 3 = 15

  15 ÷ 3 = 5

  5 ÷ 5 = 1

  Thus 180 = 22 × 32 × 5.

  Turing believed that it would not be long before a machine was devised to follow these rules. He next assumed that a machine could be invented (as it now has) that could follow the rules of chess. Third, Turing conceived what he called a universal machine, a device that could perform all calculations. Finally (and this is where the echo of Gödel is most strong), he added the following idea: assume that the universal machine responds to a list of integers corresponding to certain types of calculation. For example, 1 might mean ‘finding factors,’ 2 might mean ‘finding square roots,’ 3 might mean ‘following the rules of chess,’ and so on. What would happen, Turing now asked, if the universal machine was fed a number that corresponded to itself? How could it follow an instruction to behave as it was already doing?8 His point was that such a machine could not exist even in theory, and therefore, he implied, a calculation of that type was simply not computable. There were/are no rules that explain how you can prove, or disprove, something in mathematics, using mathematics itself. Turing published his paper in 1936 in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, though publication was delayed because, as in Pauling’s case with the chemical bond, there was no one judged competent to referee Turing’s work. Entitled ‘On Computable Numbers,’ the paper sparked as much attention as Gödel’s ‘catastrophe’ had done.9 Turing’s idea was important mathematically, for it helped define what computation was. But it was also important for the fact that it envisaged a kind of machine – now called a Turing machine – that was a precursor, albeit a theoretical precursor, to the computer.

  Turing spent the mid-1930s at Princeton, where he completed his Ph.D. The mathematics department there was in the same building as the recently established Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), and so he joined some of the most famous brains of the day: Einstein, Godei, Courant, Hardy, and a man he became particularly friendly with, the Austro-Hungarian mathematician Johann von Neumann. Whereas Einstein, Godei, and Turing were solitary figures, eccentric and unstylish, von Neumann was much more worldly, a sophisticate who missed the cafés and the dash of his native Vienna.10 Despite their differences, however, von Neumann was the man who most appreciated Turing’s brilliance – he invited the Englishman to join him at the IAS after he had finished his Ph.D. Though Turing was flattered, and although he liked America, finding it a more congenial environment for a homosexual, he nonetheless returned to Britain.11 Here he came across another brilliant eccentric, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had reappeared in Cambridge after many years absence. Wittgenstein’s lectures were open only to a select few, the philosopher/mathematician having lost none of his bizarre habits. Turing, like the others in the seminar, was provided with a deck chair in an otherwise bare room. The subject of the seminars was the philosophical basis of mathematics; by all accounts, Turing knew little philosophy, but he had the edge when it came to mathematics, and there were several pointed exchanges.12

  In the middle of these battles the real war broke out, and Turing was summoned to Bletchley. There, his encounter with the military brass was almost comical: anyone less suited to army life would be hard to find. To the soldiers in uniform, Turing was positively weird. He hardly ever shaved, his trousers were held up using a tie as a belt, his stutter was as bad as ever, and he kept highly irregular hours. The only distinction that he recognised between people was intellectual ability, so he would dismiss even senior officers whom he regarded as fools and spend time instead playing chess with the lower ranks if they showed ability. Since his return from America, he was much more at home with his homosexuality, and at Bletchley often made open advances – this, at a time when homosexuality in Britain was an imprisonable offence.13 But cracking Enigma was an intellectual problem of a kind where he shone, so he was tolerated.14 The basic difficulty was that Turing and all the others working with him had to search through thousands of intercepted messages, looking for any regularities, and then try to understand them. Turing immediately saw that in theory at least this was a problem for a Turing machine. His response was to build an electromagnetic device capable of high-speed calculation that could accept scrambled Enigma messages and search for any regularities.15 This machine was given the name Colossus. The first Colossus (ten versions eventually became operational) was not built until December 1943.16 Details of the machine were kept secret for many years, but it is now known to have had 1,500 valves and, in later versions, 2,400 vacuum tubes computing in ‘binary’ (i.e., all information was contained in ‘bits,’ various arrangements of either 0 or 1).17 It is in this sense that Colossus is now regarded as the forerunner of the electromagnetic digital computer. Colossus was slightly taller than the size of a man, and photographs show that it occupied the entire wall of a small room in Hut F at Bletchley. It was a major advance in technology, able to scan 25,000 characters a second.18 Despite this, there was no sudden breakthrough with Enigma, and in 1943 the Atlantic convoys bringing precious food and supplies from North America were being sunk by German U-boats in worrying numbers. At the darkest time, Britain had barely enough food to last a week. However, by dogged improvements to Colossus, the time it took to crack the coded messages was reduced from several days to hours, then minutes. Finally, Bletchley’s code breakers were able to locate the whereabouts of every German U-boat in the Atlantic, and shipping losses were reduced considerably. The Germans became suspicious but never imagined that Enigma had been cracked, an expensive mistake.19

  Turing’s work was regarded as so important that he was sent to America to share it with Britain’s ally.20 On that visit he again met Von Neumann, who had also begun to convert the ideas from ‘On Computable Numbers’ into practice.21 This was to result in ENIAC (the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator), built at the University of Pennsylvania. Bigger even than Colossus, this had some 19,000 valves and would in time have a direct influence on the development of computers.22 But ENIAC was not fully operational until after the war and benefited from the teething problems of Colossus.23 There is no question that Colossus helped win the war – or at least helped Britain avoid defeat. The ‘do-nothings’ at Bletchley had proved their worth. At the end of hostilitie
s, Turing was sent to Germany as part of a small contingent of scientists and mathematicians assigned to investigate German progress in the realm of communications.24 Already, news was beginning to leak out about Colossus, not so much details about the machine itself as that Bletchley had housed ‘a great secret.’ In fact, Enigma/Colossus did not break upon the world for decades, by which time computers had become a fixture of everyday life. Turing did not live to see this; he committed suicide in 1954.

  In a survey conducted well after the war was over, a group of senior British servicemen and scientists was asked what they thought were the most important scientific contributions to the outcome of the war. Those surveyed included: Lord Hankey, secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence; Admiral Sir William Tennant, who commanded the Mulberry harbour organisation during the Normandy landings; Field Marshal Lord Slim, commander of the Fourteenth Army in Burma; Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Slessor, commander-in-chief of RAF Coastal Command during the critical period of the U-boat war; Sir John Cockcroft, a nuclear physicist responsible for radar development; Professor P. M. S. Blackett, a physicist and member of the famous Tizard Committee (which oversaw the development of radar), and later one of the developers of operational research; and Professor R. V. Jones, physicist and wartime director of scientific intelligence in the Air Ministry. This group concluded that there were six important developments or devices that ‘arose or grew to stature because of the war.’ These were: atomic energy, radar, rocket propulsion, jet propulsion, automation, and operational research (there was, of course, no mention of Bletchley or Enigma). Atomic energy is considered separately in chapter 22; of the others, by far the most intellectually radical idea was radar.25