The Invention Of The Enigma During World War I

In an age of industrial progress and communication mechanisms emerging, the enigma was invented just after World War I. Though Germany believed their machine was "unbreakable", the efforts to find a flaw in their system were ultimately successful. With the state-of-the-art technology and ingenuity of the inventors, the enigma had the potential to give Germany extreme advantages during World War II, but simple mistakes cost the country their machine's success as well as their success in the war. The enigma was a rotor-based cipher machine that allowed the German military to send encrypted messages openly during WWII. There were many different models of the constantly-improving enigma and all worked slightly differently. However, the same basic …show more content…
By 1923, the machine was being sold to companies and corporations in need of secure communications, such as banks. In 1926, the German navy began using enigma, followed by the German army and air force ("Enigma Cipher Machine"). The Poles were the first group to attempt to break the enigma. They assembled a team of mathematicians who discovered that the Germans made a vital mistake- sending the message indicator twice before each enigma message. One of these men, Marian Rejewski, developed a machine in 1932 to break enigma codes called the "Bomba" (Lycett). Most of the mathematical information needed to build this device was obtained from a German spy a year earlier, information which the French cryptographer it was sent to could not make use of (Sale). The machine took advantage of the weakness in the Germans' procedure and utilized six enigma wheels which searched for repeated enciphered letters. With the Bomba in use, the Poles were able to decrypt about 75% of German radio traffic (Sale). However, Germany realized their mistake and in 1938 changed the procedure, also adding two additional rotor wheels. This was just after Poland discovered that Germany was preparing for war and gave a replica of the Bomba to the French and British during a meeting in 1939. After the British assembled a team of mathematicians at Bletchley Park codebreaking center, British mathematician Alan Turing developed the Bombe. This new machine also contained many enigma rotor wheels which searched for the rotor order, starting position, and plugboard settings. This would take an extremely long amount of time (especially since German changed the code daily), and the men at Bletchley Park discovered two German weaknesses to narrow down the possible key settings and find the correct one faster. The first was that the internal wirings of the enigma