The breaking of its code was claimed to have shortened the Second World War, and now a Rossendale man has made a fully working version of the Enigma machine.

Businessmen Paul Brougham was in his own word’s ‘hooked’ when he first set eyes on one and wanted desperately to have a machine of his own. However with only 40-50 left in working operation, the cost of the equipment that sent scrambled messages around the Nazi empire, was too prohibitive.

Instead with a background in electronic engineering, he embarked on a five year project to produce a working replica, working perfectly to the dimensions of an original.

The machine will be for ever associated with Alan Turing and part of Paul’s quest is undoubtedly to honour the mathematician who he says was shabbily treated by his home country in the early 1950’s.

Whilst according to Paul, the breaking of the code didn’t necessarily shorten the war, it did prevent the Germans unleashing nuclear weapons on the United Kingdom.

The complexities of the machine are mesmerising.One hundred and fifty million, million, million combinations of letters sequence with a new code book every month and the letters scrambled daily.

It was three Polish mathematicians who initially broke the code of a machine that the Germans had originally used to send confidential financial information between banks in the 1930’s but a team including Alan Turing would design a complex electro-mechanical device, known as The Bombe, which Paul describes as the 1940’s equivalent of a Google search engine which would eventually lead to the first semi programmable electronic computer.

Having built his first, which will be donated to Bletchley Park, where the wartime code breakers were based, Paul plans to build more, he already has another two on the go, and hopes that people will be able to use a working machine to understand better how complex a machine such as Enigma was.

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