No Imitation Game Here: Original Turing Manuscript Sold

by Lauren Cepero

Summer 2015 Intern

A 56-page manuscript written by Alan Turing, a major contributor to modern computing now known for his code breaking in World War II, has been auctioned by Bonhams auction house in New York. This collection of Turing’s “formulas and scientific musings” is contained in a small notebook, which was sold on April 13, 2015, for $1,025,000. A portion of the earnings for the code breaker’s handwritten insights will be donated to charity.

Also auctioned off by Bonhams was a functioning Enigma machine used in World War II. It went for $269,000. The Enigma machine was originally created by German engineer Arthur Scherbius, who hoped to interest commercial companies in a more secure way of communicating. The German army adapted Scherbius’ invention around 1926, and used it to code messages during World War II. The German army would use one machine to scramble an original message, which was then sent to another military base, where another Enigma machine, if using the same settings, could decipher the coded message. Using Polish intelligence about Enigma technology, Turing and his fellow team members at Bletchley Park in England were able to crack these coded messages by narrowing down the possible Enigma settings using a computing machine they invented.

The majority of Turing’s papers had already been donated to King’s College in Cambridge, UK, where Turing attended for his undergraduate degree. But this recently auctioned notebook had been withheld by Robin Gandy, a man who was not only Turing’s friend, but also an associate mathematician. While Gandy donated many of the papers Turing had left him to King’s College in 1977, he kept the manuscript in his care until his death in 1995. Gandy had also been using the blank pages as a journal. 

Recently, those who had no previous knowledge of how significant Turing’s contribution was to World War II have had the opportunity to see his life unfolded and reexamined before them. Just this year, Banbury sheets—papers used to break the Enigma code—were discovered in the walls of Bletchley Park huts. Though it was probably the star-studded 2014 film The Imitation Game about Turing and company’s time at Bletchley Park that more effectively catapulted his name into the media. The movie, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightly, was nominated for several Academy Awards including Best Picture, and won for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Did You Know?

The number of possible settings on the three-rotor Enigma is 2 × 10¹⁴⁵. Written out, that means Turing and others attempting to break the German Enigma code had a 1 in 12,276,989,683,567,292,244,023,724,793,447,227,628,130,289,261,173,376,992,586,381,072,041,865,754,882,821,864,156,921,211,571,619,366,980,734,115,647,633,344,328,661,729,280,000,000,000,000,000 chance of finding the right setting. Like those odds? Further complicating the scenario, the team only had eight hours before the Germans changed the settings and they had to begin again.