Alan Turing: The Enigma Read Online Free PDF

‘2001’ in my Author’s Note has become well-trodden history, and Turing’s scientific ‘least waste of energy’ now has a more urgent meaning. But the Victorian roots I drew upon, one English, one American, need no revision or apology. I chose a setting with the binary classicism of Lewis Carroll’s mathematical chessboard, on which Alan Turing was the pawn. But I also imbued it with Whitman’s romance of the ‘history of the future’. These dreams from the nineteenth century still speak to the crimes and follies of the twenty-first.
     
    1 Martin Davis, The Universal Computer, Norton, 2000.
    2 Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind, OUP, 1989.
    3 Richard J. Aldrich, GCHQ: The uncensored story of Britain’s most secret intelligence agency, Harper, 2010.
    4 W. Kozaczuk, tr. C. Kasparek, Enigma…, Arms and Armour Press, 1984. The original Polish text was published in Warsaw, 1979.

Part One
    THELOGICAL

1

    Esprit de Corps
Beginning my studies the first step pleas’d me so much,
The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,
The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
The first step I say awed me and pleas’d me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wish’d to go any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.
    A son of the British Empire, Alan Turing’s social origins lay just on the borderline between the landed gentry and the commercial classes. As merchants, soldiers and clergymen, his ancestors had been gentlemen, but not of the settled kind. Many of them had made their way through the expansion of British interests throughout the world.
    The Turings could be traced back to Turins of Foveran, Aberdeenshire, in the fourteenth century. There was a baronetcy in the family, created in about 1638 for a John Turing, who left Scotland for England. Audentes Fortuna Juvat (Fortune Helps the Daring) was the motto of the Turings, but however brave, they were never very lucky. Sir John Turing backed the losing side in the English civil war, while Foveran was sacked by the Covenanters. Denied compensation after the Restoration, the Turings languished in obscurity during the eighteenth century, as the family history, the Lay of the Turings 1 , was to describe:
     
Walter, and James and John have known,
Not the vain honours of a crown,
But calm and peaceful life -
Life, brightened by the hallowing store
Derived from pure religion’s lore!
And thus their quiet days passed by;
And Foveran’s honours dormant lie,
Till good Sir Robert pleads his claim
To give once more the line to fame:
Banff’s castled towers ring loud and high
To kindly hospitality
And thronging friends around his board
Rejoice in TURING’S line restored!
    Sir Robert Turingbrought back a fortune from India in 1792 and revived the title. But he, and all the senior branches of the family, died off without male heirs, and by 1911 there were but three small clusters of Turings in the world. The baronetcy was held by the 84-year-old eighth baronet, who had been British Consul in Rotterdam. Then there was his brother, and his descendants, who formed a Dutch branch of Turings. The junior branch consisted of the descendants of their cousin, John Robert Turing, who was Alan’s grandfather.
    John Robert Turing took a degree in mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1848, and was placed eleventh in rank, but abandoned mathematics for ordination and a Cambridge curacy. In 1861 he married nineteen year old Fanny Boyd and left Cambridge for a living in Nottinghamshire, where he fathered ten children. Two died in infancy and the surviving four girls and four boys were brought up in a regime of respectable poverty on a clerical stipend. Soon after the birth of his youngest son, John Robert suffered a stroke and resigned his living. He died in 1883.
    As his widow was an invalid, the care of the family fell upon the eldest sister Jean, who ruled with a rod of iron. The family had moved to Bedford to take