Nobody Believed Him — His Machine Cracked Hitler's Code, Then Britain Made Him BURN The Plans!

Britain's finest codebreakers looked at his plan for a machine with 1,600 glass valves and gave a unanimous verdict: it would not work. A Post Office telephone engineer built it anyway, partly with his own money. It worked. In 1943, Tommy Flowers offered Bletchley Park an electronic machine to attack Tunny, the German high command's teleprinter cipher. Tunny carried what Berlin was thinking, and some of its messages were signed by Hitler himself. The experts reasoned that so many valves would fail faster than the machine could finish a single job. Flowers knew something they did not: valves fail when they are switched on, not while they run. "Never move them, never switch them off, and they would go on forever." Nobody ordered the machine. His director at Dollis Hill backed him, and about fifty people built it. On 5 February 1944, Colossus did its first job. A second machine was running on 1 June 1944, five days before D-Day. By the end of the war ten machines were at work, more than 70 percent of all the Tunny messages Bletchley read came after June 1944, and a message that once took six weeks took hours. Then Britain made them disappear. On Churchill's order, eight machines were broken into pieces. Flowers fed the drawings into a boiler fire himself. The government gave him £1,000, less than he had spent out of his own pocket. When he asked the Bank of England for a loan to build a computer, the bank did not think such a machine could work, and the Official Secrets Act kept him from telling them he had already built ten. This is the story of the machine nobody ordered, the people who built and ran it, and the man nobody believed. CHAPTERS 00:00 It Would Not Work 03:23 The Machine Nobody Had Seen 11:16 Too Slow to Matter 16:43 The Wrong Man in the Right Room 23:31 Reasonable Men Say No 29:14 The Machine Nobody Ordered 35:41 Racing the Calendar 41:41 The Women at the Tape 45:06 The Fire and the Verdict Did someone in your family work for the Post Office during the war, or serve in the WRNS? Tell us about them in the comments. Stories like these deserve to be kept. SOURCES AND CREDITS Archival photographs and film: The National Archives (UK) (FO 850/234; HW 25, General Report on Tunny), Imperial War Museums (A 13709, D 5226, H 3514, H 8206, H 14018, HU 55505, MH 26392), U.S. National Archives (U.S. Army Signal Corps), Library of Congress, Harry S. Truman Library, National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, Nationaal Archief (Willem van de Poll, CC0), National Maritime Museum, Science Museum (UK), Prelinger Archives, Zuse archive, Elliott & Fry, Wikimedia Commons contributors Brandmeister, Daderot, Farai Gandiya (CC0), Mark S. Jobling, Masaki Ikeda, Matt Crypto, TedColes, Paul K. Whitaker.Bundesarchiv photographs, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE: Bild 101I-164-0357-29A (Rauch), Bild 101I-719-0240-21 and -35 (Jesse), Bild 102-07811, Bild 101I-111-1800-04 (Rudolf Kessler), Bild 146-2006-0188 (Lücke), Bild 101I-267-0148-33 (Utecht), Bild 183-J31347. Thumbnail portrait: Tommy Flowers, about 1940, photographer unknown. Technical drawings and animation: Design Under Fire. The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement. #ww2 #BletchleyPark #Documentary