Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "Breaking Enigma - Exploiting a Pole Position" video.

Amazingly, the Enigma machine was patented in 1918 by Arthur Scherbius, a German electrical engineer. It's first successful use was by the German Army in the late 1920's as a method to communicate among German manufacturers. The Germans were forbidden to rearm under the Versailles Treaty, and Enigma offered an ideal way to communicate between the Army and manufacturers that were illegally building tanks. Even though the encoded text was transmitted over normal shortwave frequencies, it was assumed the that massive number of key combinations would make it impossible for the Allies to know what the resurgent German Army was up to. The first successful attempts to break the Enigma code wasn't done by, as might be expected, the British or the Americans, but by the Poles, starting in the mid 30's. The amazing math described by Drach gave the Poles what they needed for their "Bomba", the first brute force machine to decode Enigma messages. It was the first of many built by the British and Americans.
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Well, I couldn't sleep anyway, so now I have Drach and an Enigma machine to lull me to sleep, I hope.
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@its1110 Indeed, although the Poles had a secondary driver for trying to decrypt the Enigma output. They were hoping to come up with their own version of Enigma that the Germans couldn't read, and starting with the existing version of Enigma gave them a start.
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@philperry4699 The Poles made a lot of important contributions to the successful prosecution of the war. To show our thanks, Churchill and Roosevelt turned them over to the communists. It was a shameful period of our history..
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@Betrix5060 There were many economic alternatives to war that could have been used if not for the communists in both the State Department and British Foreign Office doing everything they could to make sure the Soviets didn't suffer any economic repercussions while flouting the terms of the Yalta Agreement. The full extent of the damage done to US and British interests by Soviets spies and homegrown communist agents has yet to be fully revealed. McCarthy may have been hyperbolic in his rhetoric, but his understanding of communist infiltration in Western governments wasn't far off.
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@photoisca7386 I'm pretty sure you have more to contribute to this topic than I do with the amount of time you spent in research and your visits to Bletchley Park. I'd give my eye teeth to go there. Unfortunately, living across the pond and reaching the age where overseas travel has gotten increasingly difficult, it's not something that's going to happen. Continue to take advantage of all the things that are available to you there.
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@its1110 I turn 74 in a month. My biggest international problem has been battling my available bank balance. Combined with COPD and arthritis, sitting on an airplane for 10 hours to London just isn't in the cards.
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@f12mnb It's interesting to see ads for businesses in the late 19th century listing a couple different commercial codes the business subscribed to so their telegraph communications would be more secure.
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@57thorns I'd generally agree about commercial codes. There were two types of codes in general use around 1900 though, and I didn't make myself very clear. The first were the commercial like the the ABC and Western Union. I don't remember them carrying a higher rate than plain language telegrams, but I could be wrong. The second were cipher codes like Law's and Whittinghams. These were subscription codes that served the dual purpose of shortening telegrams and making them unreadable to someone not having the correct key. The receiving station had such a key that was usually mailed from the sender and was good for something like a month. The originating station got their codes mailed from the subscription company, and each recipient got a differently keyed table, the idea being that the chances of two companies with the same code was small. Large, highly competitive companies like steel and meat plants even paid for custom codes since, even back then, industrial espionage wasn't uncommon, and knowing the standard cipher code in use made it so the cryptanalysis of the day could rapidly learn to decode those messages. Cipher codes were charged at a higher rate, since they were pure gibberish compared to straight commercial codes. Many operators handling commercial business actually did have popular commercial codes mostly memorized, so they could sent them about as easily as plain language telegrams.
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