A Cambridge post-graduate student has recreated the “cyclometer”, the decryption device devised by Polish mathematicians that informed Alan Turing’s later code-breaking efforts.

Turing famously devised the “bombe”, a machine that was capable of decrypting messages encoded by Nazi Germany’s fiendish Enigma machines. Breaking the Enigma code produced intelligence credited with shortening World War II and saving innumerable lives. Turing’s work on the bombe grew into the digital computers on which you are reading this story.

While Turing has rightly been celebrated, Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski intuited the workings of Enigma and devised machines capable of decrypting Enigma-coded messages. The cyclometer was their first effort and a later project a later “bomba kryptologiczna” was an even better codebreaker.

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