Colossus

Colossus - By Unknown author - This file is from the collections of The National Archives (United Kingdom), catalogued under document record FO850/234. For high quality reproductions of any item from The National Archives collection please contact the image library., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=501979

    The contribution of Alan Turing in the decryption of German Enigma traffic during World War II is well known about and has been the highly deserved subject of both best-selling books and major Hollywood films. Most recently an apology was awarded him posthumously by the Government for his persecution as a gay man by the police and the Establishment, after the war was over, which ultimately led to his being publicly disgraced and his taking his own life. His contributions both to the war effort and to the theoretical underpinnings of computing are undeniable and his place in history has now rightfully been recognised.
    There is one man, however, whose contributary light has been hidden under the proverbial bushel for the vast majority of people.
    In 1942, Post Office Telephone engineer Tommy Flowers was sent to Bletchley Park to work in secret for the war effort on telephony-based issues. Fortunately it was deemed that the work was unnecessary and he was, in short, put to work on the code-breaking effort central to Bletchley, with the ultimate aim of shortening the war through the interception of encrypted enemy radio traffic.
    His work directly led to the creation of the machine that has since shaped the world as we know it: the world's first programmable computer; Colossus. Named by his co-workers at Bletchley due it being the largest piece of kit they had been given to work with, this was the very first of it's type: Turing's theoretical framework made flesh. The GPO engineers working at the Dollis Hill research centre for the Post Office created in secret what would later transform everything. The upshot of the Official Secrets Act, though was that they would neither receive credit for, or even be allowed to talk about, their momentous achievements there until decades after the war was over.
    Tommy Flowers insight into the decryption problem was an engineers'. He rightly understood that continuing to use purely electromechanical methods (relays, switches, etc.,) was always going to be far too slow for the more complex, later encryption methods employed by the Axis powers, to be of any practical use. He knew from his work in The Post Office on telephone exchange systems, that the only way forward was electronic; harnessing the power of the vacuum tube (thermionic valve) to perform logic-switching at speeds high enough to make the process swift enough to be useful. At first there was resistance from others at Bletchley on the grounds of reliability, but Flowers knew that thermionic valves were extremely reliable if kept permanently on: exactly the situation in thousands of Post Office establishments across the UK. He simply employed sound engineering principles to put into practice the impractical, and in doing so, not only helped to bring the conflict to a speedier close, but ushered in the modern, technological era, presaging home computers, laptops, tablets, games consoles and smartphones.
    No-one thus far has made a movie about this colossus - and I mean Flowers himself - of the modern era - something that should really, really be addressed. Tommy Flowers and the Post Office team deserve their retrospective moment of Hollywood fame to ensure their place in our common history and to put their achievements on the collective map. Teaching this stuff in schools would also be a splendid idea, too.