The history of the most famous cipher machine

1. Following Enigma
The history of the most famous cipher
machine in the world

2. What was the Enigma?
It was a series of electro-mechanical rotor
cipher machines, created by Arthur Scherbius
and produced since 1918.
The name „Enigma” comes from Greek word
„ainigma”, which means „a riddle”.
Enigma was very fast. It was used for
commercial and military usage.

3. How did it look like?

4. Decrypting Enigma
People worked to discover the mystery of Enigma
from the early twenties until 1932.
The French, English and Polish scientists had a lot
of difficulties with finding the way Enigma codes
each message, because each letter was ciphered
with another set of the letters from the alphabet.
Among the scientist were mainly the
mathematicians and linguists.

5. In 1929 in the Polish town called Poznań a
course of decrypting messages was organised.
Three Maths students: Marian Rejewski, Jerzy
Różycki and Henryk Zygalski took part in it.

6. The boys were very talented in Maths. They
solved the mystery of Enigma after three years
from the beginning of the research, in 1932. Since
that time Polish government and soldiers were
able to decrypt German messages.
When the Germans got to know that the way
Enigma codes messages is not a mystery
anymore, they decided to create new versions of
the machine. They also tried to create new sets of
cryptographs to code the information.
Since 1939 English and French scientists were
involved into decoding Enigma’s messages.

7. The centre of decoding in Bletchley Park,
Great Britain.

8. Thanks to the work of Polish, English and
French scientists it was possible to read each
message coded with the use of Enigma at the
end of World War II.
Decrypting one German message took 1 – 2
days.

9. Where can you see Enigma?
• Poland – Muzeum Techniki and Muzeum
Wojska Polskiego in Warsaw, Muzeum Wojska
in Białystok, Muzeum Oręża Polskiego in
Kołobrzeg
• All over the world – Munchen (Germany), Fort
Meade (USA), Canberra (Australia), Bletchley
Park (UK)
• Many Enigma machines are the possession of
individual people

10. Enigma from Muzeum Techniki, Warsaw

11. The statue of Polish cryptologists, Poznań

12. THE END 