The Breaking Of Enigma

6 Pages 1450 Words

The Breaking of Enigma

Enigma, as stated by the Merriam Webster Dictionary, is something obscure or hard to understand. Enigma, pertaining to DC Comics, is the true name of the Riddler, Batman’s most puzzling archrival. Enigma, to historians, is a German mechanical ciphering machine. This particular machine can be said to be one of the greatest secrets of World War II after the atom bomb. The Germans, during the war, crafted the ultimate coding machine called “Enigma.” The in-depth machine puzzled the opposing world by making their private messages unreadable by anyone beside themselves. The world seemed in the dark; or was it?
The theory behind Enigma can be traced back for many centuries, even as early as the 4th Century BC by the Romans4. Even Thomas Jefferson had invented a ciphering machine consisting of numerous rings on the same shaft, which is similar to the design of Enigma. Arthur Scherbius patented Enigma in 1918 for businesses1. The German’s military later caught interest, and stopped commercial production in 1923 and it became for military use only4. Enigma basically functioned by a letter being pressed on a component similar to a typewriter, which would light up a corresponding letter on the lamp board. The main unit is made up of the keyboard, lamp board, and scrambler unit. The encoding process was done in the scrambler unit. The scrambler unit is fabricated by a number of rotors turning on an axis. The rotor had the numbers 1 through 26 marked on the edges.
The ingenious machine was electrical, and quite simple. After a letter was typed, the rotors would move and send an electrical impulse to another letter on the lamp board. There were three main rotors, slow, medium, and fast. The fast rotor, the rotor to the right, would turn 1/26 of a turn each time a letter was pressed. After a full rotation from the fast rotor, the middle rotor, the medium rotor, wo...