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interest in a letter to his mother that October: I have just discovered a possible application of the kind of thing I am working on at present. It answers the question "What is the most general kind of code or ci- pher possible," and at the same time (rather naturally) enables me to construct a lot of particular and interest- ing codes. One of them is pretty well impossible to de- code without the key, and very quick to encode. I expect I could sell them to H.M. Government for quite a sub- stantial sum, but am rather doubtful about the morality of such things. What do you think? OV E R T H E E N S U I N G Y E A R , as he worried about the pos- sibility of war with Germany, Turing got more interested in cryptology and less interested in trying to make money from it. Working in the machine shop of Princeton's phys- ics building in late 1937, he constructed the frst stages of a coding machine that turned letters into binary numbers and, using electromechanical relay switches, multiplied the resulting numerically encoded message by a huge se- cret number, making it almost impossible to decrypt. One of Turing's mentors in Princeton was John von Neumann, the brilliant physicist and mathematician who had fed his native Hungary and was at the Institute for Advanced Study, which for the time being was located in the building that housed the university's Mathematics Department. In the spring of 1938, as Turing was fnishing his doctoral thesis, von Neumann offered him a job as his assistant. With the war clouds gathering in Europe, the offer was tempting, but it also felt vaguely unpatriotic. Turing decided to return to his fellowship at Cambridge and shortly thereafter joined the British effort to crack the German military codes. His Majesty's Government Code and Cypher School was, at the time, located in London and staffed mainly by literary scholars, such as Dillwyn "Dilly" Knox, a classics professor from Cambridge, and Oliver Strachey, a dilettante socialite who played piano and occasion- ally wrote about India. Tere were no mathematicians among the eighty staffers until the fall of 1938, when Turing went there. But the following summer, as Britain prepared for war, the department began actively hir- ing mathematicians, at one point using a contest that involved solving the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle as a recruitment tool, and it relocated to the drab red- brick town of Bletchley, whose main distinction was being at the juncture where the railway line between Oxford and Cambridge intersected with the one from London to Birmingham. A team from the British intelli- gence service, posing as "Captain Ridley's shooting par- ty," visited the Bletchley Park manor house, a Victorian Gothic monstrosity that its owner wanted to demolish, Codebreakers using modifed British Typex cipher machines in Hut 6 at Bletchley Park. W I R E D Rear view of a British Bombe decoding machine in Hut 11 at Bletchley Park. K N O W N A S C O L O S S U S , W A S T H E F I R S T A L L - E L E C T R O N I C , P A R T I A L L Y P R O G R A M M A B L E C O M P U T E R . T H E C O M P U T E R ,