At 12:21 AM 10/02/2015, you wrote:
Forgive me if I missed earlier discussion, but has
anybody seen the
Imitation Game movie, ostensibly about Alan Turing?
There certainly were some real howlers in there, like the bit where Turing
single handedly decides what info they would share with the British
government, so as not to alert the Nazis that the Enigma code was
broken!
Also, there is only one instance of the Bombe, while it is pretty well
known they had a set of 350 of them at Ft. Meade running 24 hours
a day. And those were the NCR Bombes, running at 1800 RPM, insted
of the one in the movie going clunk-clunk-clunk. Some other papers
seem to indicate there were another 350 Bombes at Bletchley.
It only makes sense for there to be a big array of NCR Bombes, not
the slow British-built ones, but
with all the ships being sunk, how could they be sure such a shipment
could make it across the Atlantic? These things were critical national
resources, so I just can't image the US shipped a batch of them to
Britain. (Also, there is the security issue of how to keep prying eyes
off the Bombes while being shipped.)
Also, they have Turing building the Bombe with his own hands. Various
descriptions have hundreds of people at Bletchley wiring the rotors and
doing much of the other work. The Bombe parts must have been made
in machine shops across England.
At the end of the movie, they sort of imply by a confusing flashback that
Turing tells the whole story of the code cracking work at Bletchley to
the police officer. It is well documented that he never revealed anything
to anybody about what he did there.
Any comments?
Jon
When Hollywood handles a story strange things happen. We are
lucky they mentioned
Bletchley Park at all.
Charlie Fox