Geniuses at War
Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age
1 of 1 copy available
• Winner, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Middleton Award for "a book ... that both exemplifies exceptional scholarship and reaches beyond academic communities toward a broad public audience." • A Kirkus Best Book of 2022 •
Planning the invasion of Normandy, the Allies knew that decoding the communications of the Nazi high command was imperative for its success. But standing in their way was an encryption machine they called Tunny (British English for “tuna”), which was vastly more difficult to crack than the infamous Enigma cipher.
To surmount this seemingly impossible challenge, Alan Turing, the Enigma codebreaker, brought in a maverick English working-class engineer named Tommy Flowers who devised the ingenious, daring, and controversial plan to build a machine that would calculate at breathtaking speed and break the code in nearly real time. Together with the pioneering mathematician Max Newman, Flowers and his team produced—against the odds, the clock, and a resistant leadership—Colossus, the world’s first digital electronic computer, the machine that would help bring the war to an end.
Drawing upon recently declassified sources, David A. Price’s Geniuses at War tells, for the first time, the full mesmerizing story of the great minds behind Colossus and chronicles the remarkable feats of engineering genius that marked the dawn of the digital age.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 22, 2021 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593411087
- File size: 165253 KB
- Duration: 05:44:16
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Golden Voice narrator John Lee adapts just the right tone--authoritative, intelligent, quintessentially British--for this revealing history of the men and women who cracked the Nazis' codes at Bletchley Park. Lee does exposition smoothly and with subtlety. His Oxbridge intonations and Cockney imitations vivify the narration. Ultimately, thousands worked at Bletchley, not only revealing the secrets of Enigma but also creating Colossus, the progenitor of digital computers. The listener learns of the brilliant work of mathematician Max Newman and of the extraordinary genius of Tommy Flowers, who masterminded Colossus but was little remembered. Of course, the prescient genius of Alan Turing is detailed as is his sad end. Postwar, the Yanks took the lead in computing, but the Brits' work at Bletchley sped the defeat of the Nazi war machine. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
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