Cold Open
SFX: British destroyer
At 5am on October 30, 1942, the British destroyer HMS Petard was docked at Port Said, Egypt. It was resupplying before it could go back out and patrol the waters of the Mediterranean.
Its commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Mark Thornton, 35, thickset with a boxer’s physique, paced the deck. He didn’t like being sidelined. His men knew this. At meals, Thornton would stand up, slam the bulkhead with his fists, and shout,
I must have action with the enemy!
Thornton was cruel. But he didn’t care if his men hated him. He needed to prepare them to fight the most dangerous enemy on the seas: packs of Nazi U-boats, called wolfpacks, and their nearly unbreakable cipher machine, Enigma.
Although the codebreakers at Bletchley Park had cracked an earlier version of Enigma, nicknamed “Dolphin,” now the Nazis were using an even more advanced design, which was nicknamed “Shark.” Bletchley hadn’t cracked Shark, and the U-boats had been invisible for eight months.
While Thornton was vaguely aware of his country’s code breaking efforts, he did know one thing: finding an intact Shark codebook would make cracking its cipher much easier. Thornton didn’t just want to sink U-boats…he wanted to capture one. To the point of obsession.
And so, when the radio squawk that morning, Thornton was thrilled to hear the message:
Flotilla, this is the HMS Hero. One of our planes has spotted a periscope and we’ve moved to intercept.
The commander of the Hero relayed the coordinates. Thornton grinned. The hunt was on.
Full speed ahead!
The Petard and three other destroyers steamed out of port to meet up with the Hero and join the fight.
When they arrived, it had already begun. RAF planes and the Hope were dropping depth charges, hoping to sink the sub. Petard joined the formation and dropped her own.
SFX: depth charges exploding
This went on for 16 hours, and Thornton loved every minute.
On the submarine, U-559, things weren’t going well. While no depth charges hit, concussions from the explosions caused significant internal damage. At 10pm, the Nazi captain ordered the sub to surface.
As it did, the submariners scrambled to abandon ship. Nobody thought to destroy the codebooks or the Enigma. Worse, the submariners inadvertently damaged the valves on the vents that would have let in seawater to quickly sink the ship, meaning it was sinking much more slowly.
Thornton watched the submarine surface with delight. As his men launched lifeboats to pick up the Nazi survivors, he singled out three sailors and barked an order:
Get on that sub and recover their codebooks! NOW!
They were: First Lieutenant Tommy Fasson, 29; Able Seaman Colin Grazier, 22; and canteen assistant Tommy Brown, just 16.
Accounts differ, but according to one, the three sailors stripped nude, dove into the water, and swam to the sinking U-boat.
Fasson and Grazier descended into the sub while Brown stayed in the tower. Fasson grabbed a submachine gun and smashed open every cabinet and drawer he could find.
They were in luck: stacks of top-secret codebooks for that month’s Enigma settings.
A lifeboat pulled up to the sub and the lead officer shouted to Brown:
You’d better hurry before she goes under!
When Fasson and Grazier returned with armfuls of code books, Brown relayed the message—but they went back under to retrieve more.
The U-boat took on more water. It began to sink faster.
Lieutenant Fasson! Grazier! You’d better come up! I said, you’d better come up!
Jump clear, lad! There’s no hope for them!
Brown hurled the codebooks into the rowboat and jumped away just as the U-boat slipped under. He never saw Fasson and Grazier again.
But the battle was a pivotal moment in the war. Among the documents was a short-signal codebook, used to encrypt weather reports—which went out to all the U-boats in the fleet.
Which meant, Bletchley Park could once again locate the subs.
From then on, Bletchley Park would be able to decrypt the Naval Enigma messages within a day, thanks to pioneering work done by mathematician Alan Turing. Bletchley Park’s work wasn’t finished, but Turing was needed elsewhere—both to win the war, and win the peace afterwards.
On this episode: the end of World War II, the beginning of computers, and the downfall of one of the world’s greatest scientists. I’m Keith Korneluk and you’re listening to Modem Mischief.
You're listening to Modem Mischief. In this series we explore the darkest reaches of the internet. We'll take you into the minds of the world's most notorious hackers and the lives affected by them. We'll also show you places you won't find on Google and what goes on down there. This is part two of our two-part series on Alan Turing.
Act One
SFX: ship
A few months later, the Empress of Scotland zig-zagged its way across the North Atlantic, hoping to avoid the U-boat wolf packs that still hunted these waters—and had just sunk a similar ship, Empress of Canada, a month earlier.
The Empress of Scotland was a former passenger ship converted into a troop transport. In March 1943, she held 3867 men, 471 officers, and one civilian—all of whom understood the risks.
That civilian was Alan Turing.
While Empress and other members of its convoy watched for Nazi periscopes, Turing spent the six-day voyage engrossed in a book: The RCA Radio Tube user’s manual.
Not exactly light reading material. Turing picked it up at Bell Laboratories in New York, where he’d just spent two months assisting Bell engineers in completing Project X, the Allies’ first encrypted voice transmission system.
Project X was partly built with vacuum tubes. These are just glass tubes with a vacuum inside. Edison discovered that vacuum tubes could transmit electrical current just as easily as wires could—and in fact, multiple vacuum tubes could do it faster and more powerfully.
Stack enough of these vacuum tubes together, and you can create an electrical current strong enough to power a long-range radio broadcast.
But this was just one of many potential applications.
By studying this manual, Turing was giving himself a crash course on electronics. But he could also see how vacuum tubes could be used to build a computer.
Like we saw in Part 1, Alan Turing spent his Fellowship years at Cambridge imagining a universal computing machine. In the 1930’s, such a machine was thought to be impractical if not impossible to build.
But the vacuum tube could change that.
Turing had already helped build one proto-computer, the Bombe, inspired by the Polish Bomba. Turing’s Bombe relied on electronic switches to perform calculations, which operate in milliseconds.
Vacuum tubes, on the other hand, work in microseconds. Just over the horizon, Turing could imagine a computing machine capable of calculating complex equations in just minutes.
But that would have to wait until the end of the war.
In March 1943, The Empress of Scotland pulled into port at Liverpool, having survived its journey across the treacherous North Atlantic.
The following year would be the least well-documented of Alan Turing’s life. Like we saw last time, Turing and his fellow Bletchley Park codebreakers were sworn to secrecy. So, we don’t know exactly what Turing did during this period.
But we do know that by this point in the war, Turing was deemed too valuable to assist the day-to-day efforts of breaking the Nazi Enigmas. He was Bletchley Park’s top-level consultant, and the only member of staff authorized to know about everything going on there.
Turing wasn’t really needed in Hut 8 anymore. After Turing installed his Bombe, day-to-day management of Hut 8 fell to the chess whiz Hugh Alexander, who was better suited for this role anyway.
Yes, Hut 8 was still struggling to crack the latest version of the naval Enigma, the four-rotor Enigma M4, codenamed “Shark.” As a result, by March 1943, Allied shipping losses were the highest of any point in the war. That month, U-boats sank 120 Allied ships, totaling over 600,000 tons of supplies, and hundreds of lives.
But slowly, the Battle of the Atlantic turned in the Allies’ favor.
The recent capture of documents onboard U-boat 559 allowed Bletchley to once again pinpoint the U-boats. Additionally, other technological advances in radar, depth charges, torpedoes, and anti-submarine tactics made up the difference. Sinking those 120 Allied ships cost the Nazis 12 U-boats. In May, the Allies wiped out another 41 U-boats, or 25% of the Nazi fleet.
Clearly, Turing’s expertise wasn’t needed here.
Turing would have known about another problem facing Bletchley Park: an even more sophisticated encryption machine that would soon make Enigma obsolete.
The Nazis called it a Lorenz Cipher SZ-40, or the “Schlusselzusatz.”
In keeping with its aquatic theme, the British nicknamed it Tunny, which is a nickname for “Tuna.”
Unlike Enigma, which could only scramble Morse code radio transmissions, Tunny was a teleprinter—an electromechanical typing device that could transform any letter of the alphabet into binary code, transmit it, and then unscramble it on the other end.
SFX: Lorenz cipher
Like Enigma, Tunny machines needed to use the same settings in order to communicate. But unlike the Enigma M4, which had four working rotors out of nine, Tunny had twelve rotors that could all be engaged to scramble a single message.
The first Tunny broadcasts appeared in 1941. They came directly from Nazi High Command—from Hitler himself—and went out to commanders on all European fronts. Clearly this was the Nazis’ most sensitive strategic and tactical information. If the British could crack Tunny, it could mean ending the war.
At first, Tunny messages were incomprehensible. But by early 1942, Bletchley Park mathematician Bill Tutte and his team built a working replica of the Tunny/Lorez SZ-40, without ever having seen one, calling it “The British Tunny.”
This was only the first step. They still needed to build another machine that could crack it.
Building that fell the General Post Office research station at Dollis Hill, and electrical engineers Tommy Flowers and Frank Morrell.
Like Turing, Flowers and Morrell understood that computing machines needed to move away from electromechanical switches and begin using vacuum tubes.
Their first attempt at a Tunny cracker used just a few dozen vacuum tubes. They nicknamed it “Heath Robinson,” after an English cartoonist known for drawing overly complicated machines. Heath Robinson was slow and prone to overheating and breakdowns. So, Flowers and Morrell proposed a second machine.
This one would use 1700 vacuum tubes, taking up an entire room. But it generated so much heat that it was considered too dangerous to actually build, and Dollis Hill rejected their proposal. So, Flowers rented a workshop in London and built the behemoth himself.
He called it “Colossus.” In fact, it was the closest the British had come yet to building what we would recognize as a computer—or what Turing would recognize as a Turing machine.
Yet Turing didn’t devote his time to Colossus, either. When he returned to England in March 1943, Colossus was well on its way to being built. Bletchley Park was already using the Colossus to decrypt raw Tunny messages.
This gave the British unprecedented access to Hitler and the Nazi High Command’s latest moves.
The British government decided not to pass this information on to their American and Soviet allies—and thus tip them off to Colossus’s existence.
But a mole was in their midst.
Hut 3 was the home of Bletchley Park’s efforts to break the Nazi air force’s Enigma settings. It was also home to an English mathematician named John Cairncross.
The KGB recruited Cairncross while he worked in the Foreign Service in 1936, and nicknamed him “Liszt,” for his love of music. It instructed him to get assigned to Bletchley Park and feed whatever information he could to the Kremlin.
Every few nights, Cairncross would steal translated Enigma and later Tunny messages from Hut 3. He smuggled them out of Bletchley Park by hiding them in his socks, then handed them off to his contact, a Russian spy he’d met in Bletchley Village.
From 1941 to 1945, Cairncross smuggled over 5,000 documents from Bletchley to the Soviet Union.
Some of these documents did assist the Soviets in the war—in 1943, Cairncross’s information aided the Soviets in their decisive victory at the Battle of Kursk, the biggest tank battle in the war.
Overall, however, Cairncross’s information allowed the Soviet Union to gain valuable ground on its supposed Allies, the US and the UK.
As the Soviets captured Nazi territory, they also captured intact Tunny machines. They would modify them to give themselves an advantage during the coming Cold War.
But Turing knew none of this.
So, what did Alan Turing do when he returned to England in the spring of 1943?
It’s unlikely Britain’s greatest mathematician would have taken a sabbatical. Instead, he probably participated in the biggest and most secret project of that time.
By early 1943, Allied strategy was shifting from defensive to offensive. In January, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met in Casablanca to discuss plans for an invasion of northern Europe—if successful, this invasion plus the Soviet advance would crush Nazi Germany once and for all.
The D-Day invasion would require hundreds of thousands of soldiers and sailors working in coordination to assault the beaches of Normandy.
It would also require an elaborate deception campaign, meant to deceive the Nazis into thinking the invasion would happen further down the French coast, involving fake troops, fighter planes, tanks, and of course, communications.
Turing’s biographer speculates that he played a role in the preparations for the D-Day invasion—likely using his expertise from Project-X to assist in keeping key Allied communications secret.
Whatever his role, Turing worked to support the war effort. He kept his secrets, not even mentioning them to friends and family.
On June 6, 1944, the Allies launched the D-Day invasion. 133,000 soldiers aided by another 195,000 naval personnel stormed the beaches and established a beachhead, beginning the slog to Berlin.
D-Day was successful in part due to contributions from Alan Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley Park.
After D-Day, with the Soviet Union also advancing on the Eastern Front, the war’s conclusion was decided. The Allies would spend the next 11 months grinding towards Berlin, where Nazi Germany finally collapsed in May 1945.
Turing wasn’t needed to crack Nazi or Japanese ciphers. He was free to pursue whatever research he wished.
He opted for a low-priority project: building an encrypted voice communications system similar to Project X, one that would be under British control. His colleagues and supervisors were puzzled, but Turing was playing the long game…he knew that this experience would give him valuable insight when the time finally came to build his Electronic Brain.
Turing transferred to another facility operated by the Government Code & Cipher School, Hanslope Park. It was officially a radio communications intercept station, but it also had a reputation for allowing its engineers to experiment and innovate.
Turing moved into a room on the top floor of the English country manor at Hanslope. He was assigned just one electrical engineer, a recent graduate named Don Bayley.
Together, Turing and Bayley worked to build the UK’s first encrypted voice transmitter. They nicknamed it “Delilah,” after the Biblical deceiver who tricked Samson into cutting off his hair.
Turing and Bayley developed and tested Delilah for the rest of 1944 and the first half of 1945, until Nazi Germany finally surrendered.
While American, British, and Soviet Troops began carving up Berlin into their respective spheres of influence, Turing brought Delilah to the Post Office research facility at Dollis Hill, where Tommy Flowers confirmed that it was indeed unbreakable. Turing’s next stop was the Cypher Policy Board, which had the power to build as many Delilahs as it wanted.
On the day of his appointment, Turing set up a working Delilah machine in the basement of the Cypher Policy Board, where he expected to show it to the board members.
Instead, just one person showed up. Some lackey.
Dr. Turing? I’m afraid the board can’t meet today. But you can just leave your machine with me.
Uh…I’d prefer to take it with me.
That’s all right. I’ll be sure to demonstrate it to the board at a later time.
Do you even know how it works?
I’m sure I can figure it out. Exit’s this way.
Obviously, the lackey didn’t keep his word. Delilah sat in the basement of an English government building gathering dust, a casualty of bureaucratic incompetence.
World War II was over. Turing was free to return to his academic studies and pursue his research—or so he thought.
In reality, just like in wartime, England’s post-war needs would alter the course of Alan Turing’s life once again.
Act Two
The first thing John R. Womersley noticed was the noise.
SFX: huge fans blowing, ENIAC computer working.
But his two guides seemed used to it, so he continued walking down the long corridor.
It was February 1945. Womersley, 48, was being led into the basement of the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering, where he was about to see something nobody else from the UK ever had before.
His guides were Presper Eckert, an electrical engineer, and John Mauchly, a physicist.
As they approached their destination, the whole building seemed to shake. Womersley turned to his guides.
How much power does it consume?
160 Kilowatts, Mauchly replied.
And it’s caused more than its share of brownouts, Eckert added, with a frown. The city of Philadelphia certainly isn’t our biggest fan.
They’d arrived at a set of double doors. Mauchly turned to Womersley.
Ready?
Mauchly seemed excited to show off their work—even though his government wasn’t that thrilled about sharing it with the Brits. It took Winston Churchill’s personal authority to get this visit approved.
Womersley nodded.
Mauchly opened a set of double doors.
SFX: huge fans blowing, ENIAC computer working, louder
Mr. Womersley, meet ENIAC.
Womersley couldn’t believe what he saw: forty cabinets, each 9-foot tall, packed with machinery and cooled by two 20-horsepower fans. Womersley guessed everything weighed 30 tons at least, with
ENIAC, of course, stands for “Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer,” Eckert said. It won’t be finished until the end of the year.
Womersley tried to take it all in. Mauchly smiled.
That’s 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1,500 relays, 6,000 manual switches, 5 million soldered joints. Oh, and 17,468 vacuum tubes.
Womersley finally caught his breath.
How many calculations can it perform?
5,000 every second.
That was 1,000 times faster than anything known to exist.
Of course, ENIAC does have its limitations, Eckert continued. It cannot store instructions, having no “memory” so to speak. Every operation must be programmed by hand.
Eckert gestured towards a team of women, all computer engineers who were feeding complicated paper instructions into ENIAC.
But our next-generation machine will fix that. It’s called “EDVAC.”
Womersley’s mind raced with potential applications. He knew ENIAC was originally commissioned by the US Army to calculate trajectories for artillery shells.
He also knew it could do so much more—and indeed, it would. During its lifetime, ENIAC would be used for weather predictions, cosmic-ray studies, thermal ignition, random-number studies, wind-tunnel design, and building the hydrogen bomb.
The United Kingdom needed its own ENIAC. Which meant Womersley needed Alan Turing.
John R. Womersley was the head of the Mathematics Department at the National Physical Laboratory, the UK’s top government-backed research lab.
In 1938, Womersley read Turing’s Computable Numbers. When he saw ENIAC, he recognized it for what it was: a Turing machine.
When Womersley returned to England in April 1945, he set about finding his elusive man: Dr. Alan Turing.
No easy feat—war was still on, and secrecy was still the rule of the land. But Womersley used his people skills and his boss’s connections to get the job done.
Womersley’s boss? Sir Charles Galton Darwin. Grandson of that Charles Darwin.
When Womersley located Turing at Hanslope Park, Turing was already thinking about what he wanted to do next with his life. He was still determined to build a working version of the universal machine he’d described as a 24-year-old in Computable Numbers.
Now 33, he didn’t just want to build a machine that could crank out artillery tables. He wanted a machine that could store programming instructions and revise them as it went along. He wanted his machine to learn. To think. Today, we’d call this “Artificial Intelligence.”
So, when Womersley tracked Turing down in the summer of 1945, Turing was ready for the opportunity he presented: the chance to build the UK’s first computer.
Turing was discharged from his wartime service for the Government Code & Cipher School and moved into a small office at Cromer House, a London mansion purchased by the National Physical Laboratory to headquarter the project.
But Turing quickly realized that building the UK’s first computer would be harder than he thought. He immediately disliked Womersley. Turing felt that like Commander Denniston at Bletchley Park, Womersley lacked the requisite mathematical skill for the job. To Turing, Womersley’s soft skills of navigating people and bureaucracy made him “bogus.”
But Womersley had his uses.
First, needed a name for their project. Never a fan of literal-minded acronyms like ENIAC or EDVAC, Womersley wanted something dynamic. He suggested “Automatic Computing Engine,” or ACE. Turing wryly noted that this would be Womersley’s only real contribution.
Turing's job was to write a proposal to build ACE.
But Turing faced competition. The NPL wouldn’t just be considering his proposal. It would consider funding two competing projects.
One was at Turing’s alma mater, Cambridge. It was headed by mathematician Maurice Wilkes, and called the EDSAC.
The other was at the University of Manchester and headed by Frederic Williams and Max Newman. They called it the Manchester Mark I, or the “Manchester Baby.”
All three projects would compete for funding, resources, and talent, and each would race to be the first one in operation.
For Turing, the biggest challenge was translating his esoteric mathematical concepts into practical terms, without losing their essence.
In his proposal, Turing outlined several uses for ACE. It could calculate artillery tables, just like ENIAC. But it could also:
-create schematics for electronic circuits, a process that took weeks by hand,
-or count the number of butchers demobilized from the British army in 1946,
-or solve jigsaw puzzles,
-or even play chess.
To Turing, the last was most important. It was logic-based programming, and it implied that ACE could be programmed to think like a human would.
In other words, Turing wanted to teach his machine to think for himself, and not just when it came to chess. Turing’s pitch stressed the importance of making ACE not just easily programmable, but also able to reprogram itself based on its own experience—to mimic human thought.
But when Womersley pitched ACE to the NPL’s executives, including Sir Charles Darwin, he stressed its more practical applications. ACE could revolutionize optics, hydraulics, aerodynamics, plastics, and explosives of all varieties.
The board was impressed, especially because Turing’s version of ACE needed just 2,000 vacuum tubes, not 18,000 like ENIAC.
The board accepted Turing’s pitch, deciding it would take three years to build, and cost 50,000 pounds—both of which would prove to be underestimated.
But Turing’s ideas were too ahead of his time. Few colleagues at NPL agreed that ACE should be built to think for itself—which would be much more expensive.
By mid-1947, Sir Charles Darwin and Womersley decided Turing would take a sabbatical year back at Cambridge, where he could “further develop his theories.”
He was being pushed aside, but he wasn’t bitter. He’d already accepted that whatever version of ACE got built, it wouldn’t meet his specifications. Neither of the other two British computer projects would, either.
Turing returned to Cambridge in the fall of 1947, resuming the Fellowship he’d started before the war.
He was home, but he was also at a loss as to what to do next. He dabbled in game theory, publishing an article on poker strategy. Above all, he remained focused on the concept of human thought.
How does the brain think? What chemical processes are involved? And what are the mathematical principles governing them?
Now 35, Turing thrived at Cambridge. He began training seriously at running marathons and almost qualified for the 1948 Olympics. He was elected to social clubs. He even opened his life to romance, getting entangled with a third-year mathematics student named Neville Johnson.
Turing could have happily remained at Cambridge, but in early 1948, another opportunity presented itself.
Turing kept tabs on ACE’s progress—which was abysmal. Now it wouldn’t be ready until 1950 at the earliest, and it already cost four times its initial estimate.
He’d kept tabs on the UK’s other two computer projects: EDSAC, in his backyard at Cambridge, and the Manchester Baby. By early 1948, both were online. Around that time, the Manchester Baby’s co-creator, Max Newman, reached out with an offer. The University of Manchester would create a special position for Turing. His responsibility would be running and maintaining the Manchester Baby.
It would require a move to Manchester, but it would also mean access to his very own computer.
Since leaving NPL, Turing’s priorities shifted. He accepted that the intelligent computers he envisioned were decades away. In the meantime, he could explore other areas of science and mathematics, ones fundamental to his dream of building a thinking machine—and use existing computers to assist with his calculations.
Moving to Manchester meant leaving behind Neville and his other friends at Cambridge. But he could finally put down roots. He bought a house called “Hollymeade.”
At the University of Manchester, Turing became an indispensable member of the staff. In 1949, Turing wrote the Manchester Baby’s first user’s manual. He happily taught researchers how to use it for their research, while also using it for his own.
He hoped to find new love, too. But this would be much more difficult in Manchester than at Cambridge.
As we saw in Part 1, gay men in the UK in 1950 lived under constant threat of arrest. Their best chance of meeting another man was via a clandestine hookup in various pubs, public restrooms, or alleyways. Many gay men were forced into street life—like 19-year-old Arnold Murray.
When Alan Turing met Arnold Murray around Christmas 1951, Murray was unemployed and living with relatives. Despite the obvious discrepancy in their ages and statuses, Alan and Arnold bonded over a shared love of science—even if Arnold had trouble understanding Alan’s work on “Electronic Brains.”
But their budding relationship was tumultuous, filled with accusations of theft. Then, in early 1951, Arnold mentioned Turing to a friend, Harry.
Harry was a petty criminal with a long rap sheet. He immediately sensed that this “Alan” fellow had money. Even better, the clandestine nature of his relationship with Arnold meant that Alan would be unlikely to call the police.
So, Harry broke into Hollymeade and made off with 50 pounds worth of items, including a compass, a set of clothes, and a bottle of sherry.
Turing immediately suspected Arnold was involved. He called the police—a critical mistake.
Two Manchester detectives arrived at Hollymeade, Wills and Rimmer. They took Turing’s statement and dusted for fingerprints.
They found a match with a man already in custody—Harry. Willis and Rimmer paid him a visit.
SFX: interrogation room door opens and shuts.
We found your fingerprints at a professor’s house that was burgled.
The one at Hollymeade?
So you’re familiar.
I know more than you think.
Harry described Turing’s relationship with Arnold Murray, down to the intimate details.
Gross Indecency trumped small-time robbery. Turing didn’t know it, but he was in deep trouble.
Act Three
The Sessions House in Knutsford, about 15 miles outside Manchester, is a neoclassical courthouse that stands in flawless ashlar stone the color of Mars.
By the time Alan Turing first laid eyes on it, the Sessions House had been dispensing justice—or what passed for it—for over 130 years.
But Turing didn’t have time to admire the mathematical precision that went into the façade, which resembled a Greek temple. Turing and his solicitor hastily made their way inside and headed towards the magistrate’s court.
At the entrance, they encountered a group of police officers and a court official, escorting a man in custody—
Arnold Murray. His Arnold.
Alan tried to make eye contact with Arnold, but the younger man averted his eyes.
He just wanted Arnold to know that everything would be OK. Whatever Arnold did or didn’t tell the police, he would take care of it.
The door to the magistrate’s court swung open. The two men were escorted inside, then seated at the defense table.
SFX: banging gavel.
A bored-looking judge eyed the two defendants.
Manchester magistrates court will now hear the committal proceedings for the case of Regina v. Turing and Murray.
The prosecutor stood.
Her Majesty will now call the investigating officer, Detective Wills of the Criminal Affairs Division.
Alan watched as Detective Wills approached the witness stand and sat down. He’d welcomed the man plus his partner Detective Rimmer into his home several times during the past few weeks, wanting to assist them with their investigation. He’d served them wine, even played the violin for them.
But Wills showed no hint of familiarity. He began his testimony.
I received a tip from a confidential informant that Dr. Alan Turing was engaging in indecent behavior.
The judge frowned, suddenly not so bored.
Dr. Turing reported a burglary, and while investigating said burglary, Detective Rimmer and myself discovered evidence of Dr. Turing’s relationship with Mr. Murray. When questioned, Dr. Turing admitted to an, ah, indecent relationship.
Wills then read out the entire statement Alan had given to police, admitting to everything.
Turing couldn’t believe it. He was in trouble for something as natural as an encounter between consenting adults? Hadn’t the government recently debated throwing out this law?
Turing looked to his solicitor. The solicitor looked at the judge.
Your lordship, we reserve our defense.
Turing was stunned. He was planning on pleading not guilty, but his lawyer was refusing to even defend him!
Very well. Dr. Turing’s bail is set at 50 pounds. In light of Mr. Murray’s criminal associations, he will be remanded into custody.
SFX: banging gavel
Turing watched as court officers hauled Arnold away to jail.
He was allowed to return home. But the following day, two local newspapers, the Alderley Ledge and the Wimslow Advertiser, published a report on the case, along with Turing and Arnold’s full names, and Turing’s photo.
Alan Turing was already facing years of legal jeopardy. And, no matter how his trial unfolded, he feared his professional reputation was almost certainly ruined.
But the faculty at the University of Manchester rallied around him. Max Newman and Frederic Williams persuaded university officials to keep Turing on the staff and allow him continued access to the Manchester Baby—which by now was called the Ferranti Mark I, after the Manchester arms manufacturer that built it.
Turing’s trial was a couple months away. He returned to the University and resumed his research.
Since joining the staff of the University of Manchester in 1949, Turing continued to pursue every avenue of scientific and mathematical research that would further his goal of one day building an Electronic Brain, even if it wouldn’t be realized in his lifetime.
In 1950, he published a paper called Computing Machinery and Intelligence. In it, he proposed that computerized thinking would one day become so complex, so much like human thought, that it would require a long series of questions to determine that a machine was a machine and not, in fact, a human.
He called this “The Imitation Game.”
But Turing also pursued research in other areas. He’d always been interested in the natural sciences—going all the way back to his boyhood experiments and his observations during his long runs through the English countryside.
Everywhere Turing looked in nature, he saw patterns—and patterns meant mathematics. What was the mathematical formula that created the petals of a flower, or a double rainbow? As Turing put it, there had to be a reason why these patterns existed.
In 1950 and 1951, using the Ferranti Mark I, Turing pursued research into what would become his last paper, The Chemical Basis of Morphogenics. Like Computable Numbers, it was ahead of its time and is today considered a masterpiece.
In it, he devised mathematical formulas for natural phenomenon like:
1. Gastrulation, or the process by which a cell divides itself in two, and then more.
2. Polygonally symmetrical structures like starfish
3. Leaf arrangements that follow Fibonacci sequences
4. Color patterns on animals, like a zebra’s stripes or the dappling on a giraffe.
5. And the structural patterns of Radiolaria, a type of protozoa
But of course, Turing’s legal problems interrupted all of that.
When his colleagues would ask about his impending trial, he would brush off their concerns, treating it like an annoyance. But deep down, he was afraid.
The case of Regina v. Turing and Murray was heard on 31 March 1952, in the same neoclassical courthouse as before.
Alan Turing and Arnold Murray were each presented with 12 charges of gross indecency, which the court listed in excruciating detail.
Alan initially wanted to plead not guilty, but the statement he’d given to police, which was the basis of all those charges, made that strategy a loser.
So, Alan and Arnold both pled guilty.
In his defense, Turing could only offer character witnesses. Hugh Alexander, Turing’s old Bletchley Park colleague, and Max Newman, his boss at the University of Manchester, both testified to Turing’s uniqueness, and brilliance.
But it wasn’t enough.
Arnold’s lawyer persuaded the judge that it was Alan who led his client astray. Arnold got 12 month’s probation.
Alan was given a choice: prison, or twelve month’s probation—plus a “hormonal treatment.”
By 1950, science and the law was beginning to make the somewhat progressive step of treating homosexuality like an illness instead of a crime.
Based on bad science, the medical community believed homosexuality was caused by an imbalance in the male sex hormone. Researchers injected gay men with testosterone. When this only increased their sex drive, they tried the opposite—injecting them with estrogen.
This did reduce their libido, along with side effects like growing breasts and decreased mental capability.
It was chemical castration.
But a jail stint would mean Turing had no more access to the Ferranti Mark I. At least chemical castration would let him keep his job.
So, he agreed.
As he wrote to a friend, No doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I’ve not found out. He signed the letter, Yours in distress.
Turing received an estrogen implant in his thigh, and he did undergo all the expected physical changes.
Still, he didn’t give up on pursuing his sexual identity. He made several trips abroad during this time to meet available men, without much success.
Manchester valued his contributions. In April 1953, shortly after the hormonal implant was removed the university appointed him to a ten-year Readership in the Theory of Computing. He was free to continue his biological research, which he did. He also continued his mathematical research, helping friends and proteges with their various problems.
But Alan Turing was never the same.
In June 1954, Alan Turing’s housekeeper entered his bedroom to find him lying in bed, unresponsive. Next to his bed was an apple with a few bites taken out of it. Nearby was a jar of some kind of poisonous substance, possibly part of one of Dr. Turing’s many experiments.
Investigators determined it was cyanide. Turing dipped the apple in the poison and then ate it.
His death was ruled a suicide. He was 42.
Act Four
During his life, Alan Turing touched many people—at Cambridge, at Bletchley Park, at Manchester, at Bell Labs, at the National Physical Laboratory, and in the worldwide mathematical community at large. Many were shocked to hear the news of Turing’s death.
Not least of whom was his mother, Ethel. She refused to believe it was anything but accidental. She quickly wrote a biography of her son, despite not understanding much of his work—and Mrs. Turing, we can definitely relate.
But it didn’t mention his wartime efforts, which were still classified.
Turing’s role in both building early computers and helping the Allies win World War II didn’t start to become public knowledge until the 1970’s, when the first histories of Bletchley Park began being published. Even then, Turing’s role in both laying the philosophical foundations for the Bombe, Colossus, ACE, and other computers, as well as for guiding their construction, was hardly acknowledged.
By the 1980’s, Turing biographers finally began piecing together his story, both his contributions to science and its tragic end.
Today, historians estimate that his work to decrypt the Nazi Enigma shortened the war by two years and saved up to 14 million lives.
The law criminalizing “gross indecency” wasn’t repealed until 1967 in England, and until 2003 in other parts of the UK.
Queen Elizabeth formally pardoned Alan Turing in 2013. Four years later, Parliament passed the “Alan Turing Law,” which expunged convictions for gross indecency for about 60,000 people convicted under that law.
But Alan Turing’s legacy stretched well beyond his contributions to winning World War II, and his role in LGBTQ+ history.
While he never did build a “universal Turing machine” capable of performing the functions of all other machines, computer science still hasn’t done that, either.
What Turing did do was push computer science beyond what was thought possible, assembling ideas from previous generations and updating them for 20th century technology.
Turing’s paper Computable Numbers envisioned the modern computer, which can indeed perform the functions of many other machines, from cameras to sound equipment to telephones. And his work in building early computers like the ACE and the Ferranti Mark I helped make this idea possible, eventually.
His work on the Delilah voice transmitter pre-dated modern cell phone encryption. His ideas about machine learning predicted artificial intelligence, which is still being debated today. Even his “Imitation Game” of determining human from machine led the way for today’s CAPTCHA Codes. And his investigations into Chemical Morphology led to advances in Mathematical Biology that are still relevant today.
Given all of that, it’s fair to wonder—what else would Alan Turing have accomplished had he not taken his life at 44? Would he have lived to see the computers of his imagination? Would he have assisted in their development? Or would he have continued pursuing other interests, making mathematical contributions to fields like quantum physics?
We don’t know, and we never will. I’m Keith Korneluk and you’re listening to Modem Mischief.
CREDITS
Thanks for listening to Modem Mischief. Don’t forget to hit the subscribe or follow button in your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss an episode. This show is an independent production and is wholly supported by you, our listeners and the best way to support the show is to share it. And another way to support us is on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/modemmischief or click the link in the show notes. You can also support us through a paid subscription on Apple Podcasts. For as little as $5 a month you’ll receive an ad-free version of the show plus bonus episodes exclusive to subscribers. Modem Mischief is brought to you by Mad Dragon Productions and is created, produced and hosted by me: Keith Korneluk. This episode is written and researched by Jim Rowley. Edited, mixed and mastered by Greg Bernhard aka This Show Costs an Arm and a Greg. The theme song “You Are Digital” is composed by Computerbandit. Sources for this episode are available on our website at modemmischief.com. And don’t forget to follow us on social media at @modemmischief. Thanks for listening!