imitation game movie

Charles E. Fox cfox1 at cogeco.ca
Tue Feb 10 04:12:03 CST 2015


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





More information about the cctalk mailing list