I went to the Museum of Science and Industry and saw the £50 banknote shortlist exhibition.
The exhibition had few artefacts but there was an enigma machine which the selected scientist for the new note Alan Turing famously helped crack with the Bombe.
“The Enigma machine is an encryption device developed and used in the early- to mid-20th century to protect commercial, diplomatic and military communication. It was employed extensively by Nazi Germany during World War II, in all branches of the German military.
Enigma has an electromechanical rotor mechanism that scrambles the 26 letters of the alphabet. In typical use, one person enters text on the Enigma’s keyboard and another person writes down which of 26 lights above the keyboard lights up at each key press. If plain text is entered, the lit-up letters are the encoded ciphertext. Entering ciphertext transforms it back into readable plaintext. The rotor mechanism changes the electrical connections between the keys and the lights with each keypress. The security of the system depends on Enigma machine settings that were changed daily, based on secret key lists distributed in advance, and on other settings that change for each message. The receiving station has to know and use the exact settings employed by the transmitting station to successfully decrypt a message.”
