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Journalism of Courage
An English country house does not come across as the natural choice to host the world’s first global summit on artificial intelligence (AI).
Bletchley Park, however, is not any random country house. Located about 80-odd km north of London, it is considered by many to be the birthplace of modern computing. Advances made there in cryptographic and intelligence processes during World War II contributed greatly to the Allied effort, and may have shortened the War by a couple of years.
As world leaders and tech moghuls meet at Bletchley Park to discuss the next frontier in modern computing, a look at the history of the venue where they are meeting.
When World War II broke out in 1939, like many other British agencies and institutions, Britain’s Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) was promptly moved out of London, under constant threat from German bombers.
The new location, Bletchley Park, was a Victorian country house located in a sprawling 58-acre estate in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. Bletchley was well connected by the rail network, and lay on Britain’s north-south telephone line, making it an ideal choice for the GC&CS.
Over the course of the War, over 10,000 people worked at Bletchley Park, their efforts devoted to a singular objective: to read intercepted messages from the enemy to provide useful intelligence for the War effort.
Bletchley Park is most known for cracking the ‘unbreakable’ Enigma code. Enigma machines were cipher machines used by the Nazis to encrypt their radio messages. They featured a set of rotors, as well as a plugboard, which helped create over a 150 quintillion combinations. Since settings were typically changed every 24 hours, manually breaking the code was near impossible.
This is where the Turing Bombe entered the picture. An electro-mechanical device that replicated the action of Enigma machines, British mathematician Alan Turing’s device significantly expedited the process to identify the code. At the peak of the War, hundreds of Turing Bombes would be simultaneously operated, mostly by women in dingy rooms.
By breaking the code more quickly, the invention allowed analysts to decipher German messages in time for the Allies to act on said intelligence.
Another machine built at Bletchley Park was the Colossus, to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, used specifically by the German High Command. Designed by Tommy Flowers under Max Newman, a total of 10 Colossi were built at Bletchley Park from 1943-45.
Many regard the Colossus as the world’s first programmable, electronic, digital computer, although it was programmed by switches and plugs, rather than a stored program. Unfortunately, after the War, all the machines were destroyed and the people who worked on it were sworn to secrecy. Consequently, for the longest time, it was not recognised as the world’s first computer. But it was, and it was remarkably fast for its time.
“Colossus is so fast and parallel that a modern PC programmed to do the same codebreaking task takes as long as Colossus to achieve a result,” Tony Sale, the man who rebuilt the machine from scratch, wrote in 1998. (The Colossus Computer, 1943-1996: And how it Helped to Break the German Lorenz Cipher in WWII)
Bletchley Park’s work was central to Allied planning during the War, giving Allied commanders a unique insight into the minds of their enemies. From the Battle of El Alamein (1942) to the Normandy landings (1944), Bletchley Park’s fingerprints can be seen all over Allied Successes. Historian FH Hinsley, considered the foremost authority on British intelligence during the War, contends that Bletchley Park’s contribution reduced the length of the war by two years.
Then there is the technological legacy that Bletchley Park left, the primary reason why it was chosen to host this year’s AI Summit. Principles developed by Turing and his colleagues continue to inform modern computing, artificial intelligence.
In 2020, when the pandemic hit public attractions like Bletchley Park (now a museum), Meta donated 1 million pounds for its upkeep. “Facebook simply would not exist today if not for Bletchley Park,” the company’s statement said.
An oft-ignored part of Bletchley Park’s history is the role women played in functioning. “By the height of the agency’s wartime activity, in the winter of 1944, it had recruited over 9000 staff members, more than 70% of whom were female,” Christopher Smith wrote in The Hidden History of Bletchley Park (2015).
While the higher paid and better recognised staff, in cryptanalysis and translation, were predominantly well educated upper and middle-class men, women formed the backbone of Bletchley Park. They operated the Bombe and Colossi machines, often in difficult working conditions, and formed the intricate bureaucracy that allowed the sophisticated operations of the GC&CS to go on.
“The work, a form of manual labour, though not classed as such, was physically exacting,” Smith wrote, adding that the women were also “paid far less than their colleagues engaged in cryptanalysis or translation.”
