The name Alan Turing usually pops up first. If you’ve seen the movies, you probably think the Enigma story starts and ends at Bletchley Park with a group of British crossword enthusiasts. That’s not quite right. While the British were the ones who ultimately broke the "unbreakable" back of the Nazi war machine, the question of who made the Enigma code is actually a story about a German engineer looking to protect bank transfers and a trio of Polish mathematicians who figured it all out while the rest of the world was still scratching its head.
It wasn't a military invention. Not at first.
The Man Behind the Machine: Arthur Scherbius
Before it was a tool for U-boat wolfpacks, the Enigma was a failed commercial product. In 1918, a German electrical engineer named Arthur Scherbius applied for a patent for a cipher machine based on rotating wired wheels. He didn't want to conquer Europe; he wanted to stop corporate espionage. He pitched it to the German Navy and Foreign Office, but they weren't interested. They thought their current systems were just fine.
Scherbius was persistent. He founded Scherbius & Ritter and marketed the "Enigma" to banks and railway companies. It was bulky. It was expensive. Honestly, it was a bit of a flop in the business world. But as the German military started looking for ways to modernize their communications in the 1920s, they realized Scherbius was onto something brilliant. They took his civilian design, added a few extra bells and whistles—like the "plugboard" which increased the possible combinations by trillions—and turned it into the most feared encryption device in history.
Scherbius died in 1929 after a horse-and-carriage accident. He never saw his invention become the centerpiece of a global conflict. He never knew that "Enigma" would become a household name synonymous with secrets. He just wanted to help banks keep their ledgers private.
Why the Code Was So Terrifyingly Complex
If you looked at an Enigma machine, it looked like a typewriter. Sorta. But when you pressed a key, say "A," a lamp would light up under a different letter, maybe "X." The catch? If you pressed "A" again, it wouldn't be "X" anymore. It might be "Q."
This happened because of the rotors. Every time a key was pressed, the internal wheels clicked forward, changing the electrical circuit. To decrypt the message, you had to have the exact same machine, with the rotors in the exact same starting position, and the plugboard wired in the exact same way.
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The math is staggering. There are over 150 quintillion possible settings. That is 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 combinations.
If you had a thousand people testing one setting every minute, 24 hours a day, it would take them longer than the age of the universe to find the right one by brute force. That's why the Germans were so confident. They weren't just being arrogant; they were looking at the math. They genuinely believed it was impossible to crack.
The Polish Connection: Rejewski, Zygalski, and Różycki
Most people think the code was broken in England. But the real heavy lifting—the "how-to" guide for breaking Enigma—was written in Poland. By 1932, the Polish General Staff’s Cipher Bureau realized they were sitting in a very dangerous neighborhood between a rising Germany and the Soviet Union. They didn't hire linguists. They hired mathematicians.
Marian Rejewski was the standout. He didn't have a captured machine to look at. He used pure mathematics—permutation theory—to figure out the internal wiring of the German military Enigma rotors. Think about that for a second. He "saw" the inside of a secret machine he had never touched just by looking at the patterns in encrypted messages.
Rejewski and his colleagues, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki, built the "Bomba." It was a mechanical device designed to find the rotor settings. When the Germans made the code harder by adding more rotors in 1939, the Polish team ran out of money and resources to keep up. Just weeks before Germany invaded Poland, they handed all their research, their replica machines, and their "Bomba" designs to the British and the French.
The British were stunned. They had been trying to break it with linguistics. The Poles showed them it was a math problem. Without that Polish foundation, Turing's work at Bletchley Park might have started years too late.
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Turing, the Bombe, and the Industrialization of Codebreaking
So, if Scherbius made the machine and the Poles figured out the math, what did Alan Turing do?
Turing took the Polish "Bomba" concept and turned it into a beast. The British "Bombe" (with an 'e') was much larger and more sophisticated. Turing realized that you didn't need to check every setting; you just needed to find "cribs."
Cribs were bits of plain text that the Germans were lazy enough to repeat. For example, every morning at 6:00 AM, a German weather station would send a report. It almost always ended with "Heil Hitler." Since the codebreakers knew what the end of the message said, they could use the Bombe to work backward and find the settings for the rest of the day.
It was a battle of human error against mechanical perfection. The machine was flawless, but the people using it were tired, bored, or overconfident. They used their girlfriends' initials for rotor settings. They sent the same test messages over and over. Every time a German operator got lazy, Turing's team found a way in.
The Secret Legacy of Bletchley Park
The sheer scale of the operation at Bletchley Park is hard to wrap your head around. It wasn't just Turing in a shed. By the end of the war, nearly 10,000 people were working there. Roughly 75% of them were women.
These women, like Joan Clarke, were essential. They operated the machines, cross-referenced data, and spotted the tiny patterns that the mathematicians needed. And they kept it a secret. For decades. Some people died without ever telling their spouses what they did during the war.
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The work done here didn't just end the war—historians like Harry Hinsley estimate it shortened the conflict by at least two years—it also birthed the modern computer. To crack the even more complex "Tunny" code used by the German High Command, Tommy Flowers built Colossus. It was the world’s first programmable, electronic, digital computer.
What You Can Learn from the Enigma Story Today
The story of who made the Enigma code isn't just a history lesson. It’s a blueprint for how we handle technology today.
- Security is a human problem, not just a technical one. The Enigma was technically perfect, but human laziness (the "cribs") broke it. Your 20-character password doesn't matter if you leave it on a sticky note.
- Diverse thinking wins. The British were failing because they used classicists and linguists. They only succeeded when they brought in the mathematicians and "weird" thinkers like Turing and the Polish team.
- Collaboration is key. If Poland hadn't shared their secrets in 1939, the map of Europe would look very different today.
How to Explore This History Further
If this sparked a bit of a "history bug" for you, there are some incredible places to see this stuff in person.
- Visit Bletchley Park: It's a museum now, just outside London. You can see the actual huts where Turing worked and watch a reconstructed Bombe in action.
- The National Museum of Computing: Located on the same grounds as Bletchley, this is where you can see the Colossus. It’s a pilgrimage for any tech nerd.
- The Piłsudski Institute: Research the Polish contribution. Many historians are now working to give Rejewski, Zygalski, and Różycki the credit they were denied for decades due to Cold War politics.
- Try it yourself: There are various Enigma simulators online (and even mobile apps) that let you type messages using the exact rotor settings the Germans used. It gives you a real feel for the tactile nature of the encryption.
Understanding the Enigma is about recognizing that "innovation" is rarely a solo act. It’s a chain of events—from a German engineer's failed business dream to a Polish mathematician's breakthrough, finally landing in the hands of a British genius who helped build the future.
The code was made by many, broken by many more, and changed the world forever.