INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Image copyrightScience Photo LibraryImage caption
The Bombe was used to work out Enigma machine settings to help read
German communications
The UK's National Museum of Computing has expanded its exhibits celebrating the UK's wartime
code-breakers and the machines used to crack German ciphers
On Saturday it will open a gallery dedicated to the Bombe, which helped speed up the cracking of messages scrambled with the Enigma machine
the machine and create its new home.The replica Bombe is a copy of the electro-mechanical machines used in World War II at Bletchley
It was designed to discover the settings used by German Enigma machines to scramble messages, and make them unreadable
Code-breakers at Bletchley turned to machines to crank through the millions of settings made possible using the Enigma machine so they could
quickly discover which were being used
Image copyrightJon CapeImage caption
The Bombe will sit in Block H - where the originals were located in wartime
The initial design of the Bombe was drawn up by Alan Turing and later refined by Gordon Welchman
The gallery is being opened on the 106th anniversary of Turing's birth.The Bombe is a replica painstakingly constructed by a team recruited
by retired engineer John Harper
The team was gathered in the 1990s and the replica was completed in 2007.The gallery housing the machine will be opened by two of the
A demonstration will be given of how it was used to crack German codes
The Bombe will sit alongside other key machines used by code-breakers at Bletchley, including Colossus - a forerunner to modern computers -
which was developed to tackle messages passing to and from Hitler and his high command.The work done by the thousands of workers at
Bletchley during the war, cracking the secret messages, is believed to have shortened the conflict by several years and saved many lives
