The Churchill Series – Jan. 9, 2006

(One of a series of weekday posts on the life of Winston S. Churchill.)

Many of you know about the WW II British code-breaking work done at Bletchley Park. Breaking the Germans’ Enigma communication system was only one of the successes achieved by those working at Bletchley. They did something else that I think was colossal. Read on and see if you don’t agree.

Bletchley's role in breaking the German, Italian and Japanese signals codes is held by many historians to have been the paramount factor in the Allied victory of 1945.

Some have argued that the valuable intelligence garnered by the Ultra team probably shortened the war by at least two years, saving thousands of lives on both sides. But code-breaking was not Bletchley's only success.

In seeking the means to unpick the codes the Government had assembled probably the largest and most talented team of scientists ever to work together on a single project. It has been suggested that Bletchley was selected to be Station 'X" because of its location exactly half-way between Oxford and Cambridge.

The highly technical nature of the work led to the development of "Colossus," the world's first programmable electronic computer. By the end of the war ten Colossus computers were operating, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Each was up to sixteen feet long, twelve feet wide and eight feet high, with up to 2500 valves.
A modem micro-chip the size of a matchbox is capable of performing the tasks for which Colossus was developed fifty years ago!

I knew a great deal of theoretical work that contributed to the development of computers had been done Bletchley but was unaware of “Colossus.”

Churchill surely knew about “Colossus” but we don’t have, as far as I know, any comments from him on it because during his lifetime almost all the activities conducted at Bletchley remained secret.

You can read more about Bletchley and its contribution to our victory in WW II here.