Tommy Flowers at Bletchley Park

4 Likes

Certainly a contributor who should be recognised - inventor and engineer, perhaps. From the article:

The machine Newman now designed … by no stretch a computer in the modern sense … relatively quick to build. BP staff named it Heath Robinson … use of two teleprinter tape loops, one containing the binary cyphertext to be attacked and the other Tunny’s already decrypted wheel patterns … slow and not perfectly reliable. When the team building it ran into difficulties, Turing suggested they consult an engineer he’d worked with and been impressed by. That engineer’s name was Tommy Flowers.

And

Working in his lab at Dollis Hill, visiting Bletchley as needed, Flowers improved Newman’s design … but still considered it a poor machine. In response, in February 1943, he stunned the boffins with a plan for a fully electronic digital machine that would use thermionic valves as switches to generate and process the zeroes and ones used for binary calculation. Valves … had a reputation for constantly failing. Yet, having pioneered their use in automatic telephone exchanges, Flowers knew that if left switched on they were highly reliable.

The idea of using valves as switches in a digital system was so new and radical that Flowers may have been the only person in Britain capable of seeing it – and of knowing they would be millions of times faster than the traditional electromechanical switches Newman used: he had already used them to build a prototype digital memory unit for the Post Office, a truly astonishing first. Nonetheless, Flowers later characterised the response he got at BP as “incredulity”. Nothing like the machine he proposed, using 1,600 valves to perform digital calculations, had ever been contemplated … Just as mathematicians had been sidelined in favour of genteel denizens of the humanities at first, so building actual things implied “trade”, which tended to be looked down upon.

Edit: this is a nice bit, especially relevant to any attempt to single out individuals:

Uncle wrote Daniel this wonderful letter, in which he thanked him for defending him, then said, ‘You know, when a new discovery is about to be made, it’s usually happening in several places at the same time, because different developments, in different disciplines, are all making different moves forward, until enough is known that a new step is needed. It’s never just one person in one place.’

2 Likes

That’s very interesting! Does anyone know more about this?

1 Like