The History of Enigma

Hey community, first of all I hope that you are all well and that you have a weekend that has been full of positive experiences! In this post, I would like to go into cryptography and hope you are able to expand your knowledge.

Some time ago, I was able to photograph an old Enigma, which is also a name for various cipher machines that were used to encrypt messages during the Second World War. The developer is the engineer Arthur Scherbius (1829 - 1929) who was known for his diverse inventions and the first patent for his machine was already published in the the First World War in 1918 and he named it after the Greek word aínigma which means a puzzle and anyone who wants to properly understand the history behind the blockchain can't get past the Enigma, which is considered an important milestone in cryptography. The first models were probably produced in 1923 and a huge demand for these machines quickly developed and Scherbius decided to market it in a commercial context and it also aroused interest inside the military and the first specimens were used in the German navy and it happened that over the years it has flowed more and more into the military and was removed by the commercial market and it was mainly used in the Second World War by the german army and other involved authorities. It is suspected that tens of thousands of models were produced and also other countries were interested in the Enigma how Switzerland which used the model Enigma-K which was considered less safe and probably even cracked and the Swiss have gained a lot of experience in this area after a few years and decided to design their own machine which should bear the name Nema and can also be considered as a further development of the German Enigma. Nema had a more precise functionality and was much more difficult to crack and was put into operation after the Second World War and mainly used by Swiss authorities and was still in use until shortly before the 80s.

After the war, the Enigma machines also arrived to other countries and also in Russia they were fascinated by the technology of the Germans and continued to use the Enigma in Moscow for many years and also in Korea they still used Enigma for a very long time and some of the captured Enigma specimens were also sold to numerous other countries like England, Africa, Israel, Asia and numerous other countries. An Enigma consists of a kind of keyboard and resembles the appearance of a typewriter and for the encryption different wheels were used which could be replaced and the wiring and electrical contacts were also important and when it comes to the encryption, it was about swapping the letters which could then be decrypted again with another Enigma. Enigma was considered extremely safe and the cracking procedure took weeks and the first who cracked it were probably the British codebreaker Alan Turing (1912 - 1954) but it came out some time later that long before Turing cracked it, some people from Poland are said to have already been successful. In 1929 an Enigma is said to have been intercepted in Poland and they have found methods to crack it, but at that time they did not know the exact technical details in Poland and the basis of the Polish work was also helpful for the British and Americans to design machines with which Enigma could be cracked more easily, which was probably first deciphered by the in Poland in 1933. Current estimates show that some of the old Enigma machines have been destroyed and it has now been a revolutionary invention in the world of cryptography and was due to the countless combination possibilities extremely difficult to crack.

Thank you for the visit and I hope you could learn something new about history! I captured these pictures with my Camera Sony Alpha 6000 plus 55-210 mm lens