Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Sarah Dowdy and today I am joined by a
Speaker 1: very special guest, Jonathan Strickland. Hey there, So you guys
Speaker 1: probably remember Jonathan Strickland. He joined um. He joined both
Speaker 1: of us a few months ago as the Admiral for
Speaker 1: our Renaissance Festival episode. But this time he is here
Speaker 1: in his real life version, presenting on technology, which is
Speaker 1: your your specialty, my forte. As they say, there will
Speaker 1: be no hazas this particular episode. Maybe we could squeeze
Speaker 1: one and at the end or something. But Jonathan is
Speaker 1: the co host of tech Stuff is probably a lot
Speaker 1: of y'all know, and he also is a staff writer
Speaker 1: who specializes in technology articles and Deplina and I often
Speaker 1: talk about how you would like somebody like Jonathan and
Speaker 1: Chris to join us for technology related episodes sometimes when
Speaker 1: we really want something better explained than we're able to do.
Speaker 1: And we've actually covered a lot of the same topics
Speaker 1: as you and Chris too, Yes, that's true. We've We've
Speaker 1: covered several things, including Ada Lovelace, who I think got
Speaker 1: an enormous amount of praise on both of our podcast
Speaker 1: she was phenomenal, absolutely holomonal to be able to reach
Speaker 1: a point where not only was she able to write
Speaker 1: programs for a machine that did not yet exist, but
Speaker 1: recognize that numbers can substitute in for things and actually
Speaker 1: represent other forms of media like music or pictures at
Speaker 1: a time where there was no device to do that.
Speaker 1: On is beyond my imagination to do all that while
Speaker 1: being the daughter of Lord Byron. Of course, well you know,
Speaker 1: I would say that helps probably had a little dose
Speaker 1: of the crazy in there too, but no, absolutely phenomenal
Speaker 1: and other topics as well, But yes, and this is
Speaker 1: one that that I know that stuff you missed in
Speaker 1: history classes touched on related topics, and we at Tech
Speaker 1: Stuff have talked about some related topics, but we wanted
Speaker 1: to sort of look at the overall picture of what
Speaker 1: cryptography was like during World War Two. And this will
Speaker 1: be sort of the kickoff of a little series that
Speaker 1: I'm going to do with a few other How Stuff
Speaker 1: Works podcast co host who all focusing on something that's
Speaker 1: history related but also focused on their specialty. So that's
Speaker 1: why Jonathan has picked Codes Today, something that is tech
Speaker 1: related but has a really fascinating history behind it too, Yes,
Speaker 1: and that history stretches way back before World War two,
Speaker 1: of course. Uh. And I even had a little crash
Speaker 1: course in cryptography I wrote up so that we could
Speaker 1: kind of have a common language to work from. And
Speaker 1: it does come from a pair of Greek words. Essentially
Speaker 1: means hidden writing is what cryptography really boils down to,
Speaker 1: and it is the idea of hiding a message by
Speaker 1: encoding it and so way, and very common way is
Speaker 1: using a cipher where you are replacing letters within a
Speaker 1: message with some other letter or symbol or number, and
Speaker 1: you're using a very specific key so that someone who
Speaker 1: receives that message, the intended recipient, can take the encoded message,
Speaker 1: they take the key, and then using the key, they
Speaker 1: decode the message. But ideally anyone else who intercepts said
Speaker 1: message would just have a bunch of gibberish that they
Speaker 1: could not understand. Now, in reality, a lot of these
Speaker 1: ciphers don't remain secure forever, and we will see, right
Speaker 1: and there we have some very good examples of that.
Speaker 1: But there are a lot of different types of ciphers,
Speaker 1: and one of those, the most basic is the mono
Speaker 1: alphabetic cipher. That's where you use one symbol to replace
Speaker 1: each letter, and probably everybody is familiar with that one.
Speaker 1: It's what I used in my spy club as a kid.
Speaker 1: It's pretty straightforward. Maybe when you're eight it seems like
Speaker 1: it would be a breakable, but in reality it's pretty
Speaker 1: easy to crack right right. This would be when you
Speaker 1: might say, all right, let's shift all the letters over
Speaker 1: four letters, and no one will ever figure it out, right,
Speaker 1: So A becomes D and B becomes E and uh.
Speaker 1: It seems at first, when you are unaware of how
Speaker 1: to analyze cryptography that that would be be fairly secure.
Speaker 1: But just using something simple as a frequency analysis, which
Speaker 1: is typically the frequency that certain letter combinations appear in
Speaker 1: any given language. So if you know that the message
Speaker 1: was written in English, you know it's ciphered, but it's
Speaker 1: an English based language, you could start looking for letter
Speaker 1: combinations that would give away what the coded letters are.
Speaker 1: So look for double letters for example. Those could be
Speaker 1: ta s or l's, things like that, things word very
Speaker 1: short words exactly if you haven't. If you if you
Speaker 1: have your text actually broken up in the same grouping
Speaker 1: of of letters as your plain text, words are that's
Speaker 1: a dead giveaway, which is why a lot of ciphers
Speaker 1: are written in five letter blocks, so that you might
Speaker 1: even have two short words combined together or a very
Speaker 1: long word broken across a couple of blocks, and it
Speaker 1: makes it harder to detect, but even then pretty easy
Speaker 1: to figure out exactly the analysis. So another version of
Speaker 1: this one that's a little bit more complicated, is the
Speaker 1: polyalphabetic ciphers, and those substitute each letter with a different
Speaker 1: symbol based upon where the letter appeared in the message.
Speaker 1: So instead of a direct substitution, just it's the first letter,
Speaker 1: it's the second letter, and so on, it can be
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah, and there's there's a couple different methods
Speaker 1: of doing this where, for example, the first time the
Speaker 1: letter if the letter A appears in your message, it
Speaker 1: maybe in ciphered. I'm just grabbing the letter at random
Speaker 1: with L. And the second time the letter A appears,
Speaker 1: it may be the letter D. And it all depends
Speaker 1: upon the specific set of rules you have set down
Speaker 1: for that key the algorithm, if you like, that's the
Speaker 1: specific protocol the you follow, and that does make it
Speaker 1: much more difficult to break because you can't guarantee that
Speaker 1: every time you see a certain cipher that it's going
Speaker 1: to translate to the same letter. Moving on from there,
Speaker 1: we get a little bit more complicated and have polygraphic ciphers.
Speaker 1: Those use a combination of letters, numbers, or symbols for
Speaker 1: each quoted letters, so we don't have this direct translation anymore.
Speaker 1: It's not going to be something that you can just
Speaker 1: break out into the original words in the plane text
Speaker 1: to the cipher text. That's right. You. It's very confusing
Speaker 1: when you first get one of these messages because you
Speaker 1: can't be sure how many characters represent one single letter,
Speaker 1: and by doing that you really make it more difficult
Speaker 1: to break the code. And then I think the last
Speaker 1: one we have here is the transposition ciphers, which it's
Speaker 1: kind of like a word jumble, where you've taken the
Speaker 1: letters of the of the message, the plane text message,
Speaker 1: and you just mixed up the letters. So you're not
Speaker 1: replacing any letters here, you're mixing them up according to
Speaker 1: a in a prearranged code. So you might say, all, right,
Speaker 1: letter of this message should appear first, then the fifth
Speaker 1: letter of the message apers second, and you just follow
Speaker 1: that key and as long as the other person has
Speaker 1: the same key, they can unscramble it, but of course
Speaker 1: that's not terribly safe either. People with a lot of
Speaker 1: imagination can piece us together, sort of like Sunday Morning.
Speaker 1: Not for your top secret message. Yeah, a hobbyist could
Speaker 1: could crack that with enough ingenuity and time. So another
Speaker 1: element in here, and one that we're going to be
Speaker 1: talking about quite a bit in our second episode on
Speaker 1: this uh this subject is codebook. So code books, of
Speaker 1: course contain a list of phrases that linked to specific
Speaker 1: code words. So if you were just reading them, they
Speaker 1: might be familiar words, but they don't have any meaning
Speaker 1: to you. You can't you can't decipher it. You can't
Speaker 1: into it what the word might represent in any way
Speaker 1: unless you have the book right. So you could possibly
Speaker 1: break a cipher and you know that this next word
Speaker 1: is hawk, but you don't know what hawk means. It
Speaker 1: could it could mean a bird, but it might actually
Speaker 1: stand for something else, probably does in the case of wartime,
Speaker 1: And you know, you might be able to make some guesses,
Speaker 1: but you're not necessarily going to know. So codebooks were
Speaker 1: also very very important on both sides during the World
Speaker 1: War Two, And if you combine that with ciphers, you
Speaker 1: are getting a pretty tough code. Finally, and then a
Speaker 1: related technique to cryptography is called steganography, which is hiding
Speaker 1: a message within an image or some other kind of medium. Right,
Speaker 1: this is really super cool stuff. This is where let's say,
Speaker 1: Sarah that I met you on the street and I
Speaker 1: handed you a postcard and the postcard just said hey,
Speaker 1: how are you doing? And it has nothing else on
Speaker 1: there's no other message there, and you think, oh, well,
Speaker 1: that's just completely innocent. But on the flip side of
Speaker 1: the the postcard, where the picture is, which looks like
Speaker 1: this nice little landscape, you could maybe actually noticed that
Speaker 1: along the edge of a lake, there's really a message
Speaker 1: that's in there. And you look more carefully and you
Speaker 1: see that there's something hidden and it's hidden from plain
Speaker 1: sighte uh. And it can get a lot more complicated,
Speaker 1: especially with today's technology, where you can hide things in
Speaker 1: u R L, you can hide things within a QR code.
Speaker 1: It's it's lots of different ways of hiding a message,
Speaker 1: but it's done in such a way that from the
Speaker 1: casual observer's perspective, no message even existed. I like this one,
Speaker 1: although it doesn't sound quite as practical as the others,
Speaker 1: especially for wartime communications. You're not really thinking romantic spy
Speaker 1: sort of stuff. Yes, exactly, all right, So now that
Speaker 1: we've gotten a background on cryptography, we can start talking
Speaker 1: about how it was used in World War Two, which
Speaker 1: is sort of the heyday almost it seems, of cryptography.
Speaker 1: It's it's really I would say World War Two is
Speaker 1: probably the foundation for modern cryptography. The developments that were
Speaker 1: made during that era leading up to World War Two,
Speaker 1: but really uh intensely built upon during the years of
Speaker 1: World War Two that has led to to the way
Speaker 1: we use cryptography today. So it's it's an important time
Speaker 1: in history as far as this whole development of science
Speaker 1: is concerned. It is. And we're going to start by
Speaker 1: talking about the axis powers use of cryptography, partly because
Speaker 1: we want to start this whole thing off by talking
Speaker 1: about the Enigma machine. It's probably the most famous example
Speaker 1: of cryptography in World War Two, I would say, and
Speaker 1: something that we have both talked about on our podcast.
Speaker 1: Deplena and I talked about it in our Alan Touring episode.
Speaker 1: You and Chris talked about it in your Alan Touring episode.
Speaker 1: It's something that I think most people out there are
Speaker 1: they've at least heard of it. Yes, And if you
Speaker 1: were to look at one of these things, it would
Speaker 1: look like it was a typewriter and a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of lightbulbs and some plugs going every which way, and
Speaker 1: you might wonder what was the purpose. Looks like a
Speaker 1: mad inventor thought. It really doesn't. And the person who
Speaker 1: actually thought it up was not a mad inventor. He
Speaker 1: was he was quite He was ingenious in his own way,
Speaker 1: as Dr Arthur Sherbius, And that was in nineteen twenty three,
Speaker 1: and he was inventing this not as a means for
Speaker 1: the government to pass along secret messages to various branches
Speaker 1: of the military or intermilitary messages. It wasn't meant for
Speaker 1: that at all. It was meant for corporations to try
Speaker 1: and send secret messages so they could keep corporate secrets,
Speaker 1: so that other competitors wouldn't steal corporate information, private information private.
Speaker 1: But of course the German government quickly realized that this
Speaker 1: could be a useful tool for very secret communications, and
Speaker 1: so in nineteen the German Navy started using a modified
Speaker 1: version of the Enigma machine and and from there it
Speaker 1: sort of picked out the German Army followed in nineteen
Speaker 1: The Air Force started using one in nineteen thirty three.
Speaker 1: We should say, though they were all modified, they were
Speaker 1: all a complicated version of this commercial machine, right, and
Speaker 1: they even evolved during the course of World War Two somewhat. Now,
Speaker 1: if you want to know what the basic sheen is,
Speaker 1: you have to imagine imagine a disk around wheel, all right,
Speaker 1: and it's thick, It's about maybe half an inch thick,
Speaker 1: and on either side of the wheel are contacts electrical
Speaker 1: context that an electrical UH current can pass through. Along
Speaker 1: the outer edge of the wheel, where if it were
Speaker 1: a tire, this is the part that we make contact
Speaker 1: with the ground. Along that outer edge are letters that
Speaker 1: represent positions. Now you have three of these in a
Speaker 1: basic Enigma machine, all right, and you the way you
Speaker 1: set these, how you set them determines the pathway the
Speaker 1: electricity takes when it comes in on one side and
Speaker 1: goes out the other. Now, uh, you can change the
Speaker 1: orientation of these reels in multiple ways, so that makes
Speaker 1: it very complex. So this pathway could take lots of
Speaker 1: little criss cross the ways. And what it boils down
Speaker 1: to is the typewriter part with all the keys. When
Speaker 1: you press a letter, it sends an electric signal into
Speaker 1: the rotors. It goes through this complicated pathway that's determined
Speaker 1: by the orientation of those rotors. When it comes out
Speaker 1: the other side, it lights up a light bulb representing
Speaker 1: a different letter when you So when you press the
Speaker 1: letter A, perhaps the letter Q yes. And so it
Speaker 1: takes two people to do this. Someone has the normal message,
Speaker 1: the message that is supposed to be encoded, and they
Speaker 1: press a key. There's a second person who watches the
Speaker 1: light bulbs and writes down which letter lights up. And
Speaker 1: after you press that A, the rotor, the first rotor
Speaker 1: on the left rotates one position. So that means the
Speaker 1: pathways for the that electric current to follow through have
Speaker 1: changed from the first letter to the second. That's right.
Speaker 1: So if the first two letters were A A for
Speaker 1: some reason, and you pressed A and the Q lit up,
Speaker 1: the second time you press A, perhaps the M lights up,
Speaker 1: and every time after that's gonna light up differently. So
Speaker 1: you already have so many possibilities just from that simple
Speaker 1: disc option. But there's a way to make it even
Speaker 1: more complicated, right there. There are two things that make
Speaker 1: this even more complex. One is that once you go
Speaker 1: through a certain number of of moves with that first rotor,
Speaker 1: the second rotor can rotate, which means you've just added
Speaker 1: a whole new set of variables. And with the German
Speaker 1: Navy they had four rotors in their Enigma machines, which
Speaker 1: means that once the third one would rotate, it just
Speaker 1: made it even more complex. And this allows you to
Speaker 1: have a key that does not repeat. It does mean
Speaker 1: that whoever has the recipient, whoever the recipient is, they
Speaker 1: have to have a machine set up the exact same
Speaker 1: way that your machine was set up. Now, the other
Speaker 1: thing that made this complicated was they had plug boards,
Speaker 1: so unfair really, the plug boards, and what the plug
Speaker 1: boards did was you were you would attach a cable
Speaker 1: that would swap the input of a certain key with
Speaker 1: another key. So let's stick with A. Let's say that
Speaker 1: you have a plug in the A and a plug
Speaker 1: in the H, which means every time you press A,
Speaker 1: it's as if you had pressed H on an unaltered machine.
Speaker 1: So that makes it even more complex. And the plugboards
Speaker 1: were added a little later. That was an evolution of
Speaker 1: the Enigma machine. And the Germans were so confident that
Speaker 1: this machine was uncrackable that they never ever worried about
Speaker 1: anyone intercepting their messages because those ciphered messages would be
Speaker 1: impossible to decipher. They were a little too confident, though,
Speaker 1: because there were a few problems with the whole thing,
Speaker 1: one being that the machine couldn't encode a letter as itself.
Speaker 1: So you've been using the example A A could never
Speaker 1: be A no matter what combination of rotors you were using,
Speaker 1: no matter how many cables were involved, A just couldn't
Speaker 1: be A. That's a pretty big clue. I mean, it
Speaker 1: doesn't sound like it reduces your your options that much,
Speaker 1: but it really does if you're thinking about it in
Speaker 1: terms of probability. Right, Yes, that's that was one of
Speaker 1: the things Touring jumped on right away was he said, well,
Speaker 1: if this machine cannot in code a letter as itself,
Speaker 1: that removes one option out, and by removing one option
Speaker 1: you have given us a foothold. That was definitely a weakness.
Speaker 1: Another was that in order to make this work again,
Speaker 1: you had to have two machines and you had to
Speaker 1: have them both set up the same way, which meant
Speaker 1: if someone were able to get hold of a machine
Speaker 1: and the codebook so they you could see which which
Speaker 1: set up was needed for any particular day. You know,
Speaker 1: everyone had to know how to set their machine up
Speaker 1: once they received the message, then they could intercept a
Speaker 1: message and then interpret how to decipher it. Um, you
Speaker 1: just had to know the day the message had been sent.
Speaker 1: You had to know the day the message was sent,
Speaker 1: so and you had to have a corresponding codebook that
Speaker 1: would tell you the right setting for that day. But
Speaker 1: even without that, once they started learning how the actual
Speaker 1: machine worked, they were able to start thinking, how can
Speaker 1: we simulate this by building something of our own that
Speaker 1: can take this information and perhaps decide of it. So
Speaker 1: if we intercept a message, we can if if even
Speaker 1: if we don't know what the original settings were, perhaps
Speaker 1: we'll be able to create something that can run enough
Speaker 1: simulations through where we can crack the code. And Polish
Speaker 1: mathematicians got a toe hold in this by intercepting an
Speaker 1: Enigma machine, so they could see a little bit what
Speaker 1: what they were dealing with and what kind of machine
Speaker 1: would need to be created to possibly break this code. Yes,
Speaker 1: and they ended up sharing that information with Bletchley Park,
Speaker 1: which a famous famous institution there during World War Two.
Speaker 1: That was that was codebreaker central for the British a
Speaker 1: manor house, and I should take this opportunity to I
Speaker 1: think one time we said it was in London. It's
Speaker 1: outside of London. That was the whole point, because it
Speaker 1: was more secure being away from the city. But yeah,
Speaker 1: with this information that the Polish mathematicians had with their
Speaker 1: intercepted Enigma, the teams at Bletchley Park started working on
Speaker 1: building these early computers called bombs to a eventually simulate
Speaker 1: the Enigma machine and figure out how it worked and
Speaker 1: figure out how to break it. But what I think
Speaker 1: is interesting is that this was I was talking to
Speaker 1: you about this earlier, and it's kind of hard for
Speaker 1: me to wrap my mind around. But they're working by
Speaker 1: process of elimination. Rather than like, Okay, what was it
Speaker 1: set on? It's more what was it? How was it
Speaker 1: not set? Yes? Yeah, By eliminating all the potential factors,
Speaker 1: they narrow it down to the one that it actually was. Uh.
Speaker 1: It really reminds me of quantum computing. Actually, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to go into it, don't get there. But but
Speaker 1: I'm just saying a similar thing. You're eliminating all the
Speaker 1: all of the possibilities to get down to the one reality.
Speaker 1: And it is pretty amazing. The bombas that the Polish
Speaker 1: mathematicians had created ended up informing the British when they
Speaker 1: started creating the the bumba b O m b E.
Speaker 1: I always like to say the bum and uh and
Speaker 1: yeah that was that was a huge, huge jump in
Speaker 1: of crypto cryptanalysis and just the British war effort in general.
Speaker 1: And one thing about all of these these codes and
Speaker 1: decoding them is there's so many different names. There's the
Speaker 1: name of the machine, there's the name that the opposing
Speaker 1: force usually calls the code, and then the name of
Speaker 1: the machine that is able to decode it. But in
Speaker 1: this case, the Allied efforts to decode the German messages
Speaker 1: was known as Ultra. Yeah, it was known as Ultra,
Speaker 1: but you never said it ever, Ultra. I just didn't
Speaker 1: say anything at Fletchley Park, like it's all done through
Speaker 1: semaphoreign mime. Uh No. Ultra was such a secret term
Speaker 1: that you were not supposed to utter it to other people.
Speaker 1: Ultra was just a general term that referred to intercepted
Speaker 1: and deciphered messages. And because it was such secret information,
Speaker 1: you could not you could not reveal that to anyone
Speaker 1: who was not already classified to know it so much
Speaker 1: so that there were people who lost their jobs, who
Speaker 1: were court martialed because they refused to deliver sources of
Speaker 1: information because it fell under the umbrella of ultra. And
Speaker 1: so there are people who are discredited during the war
Speaker 1: because they were maintaining this level of secrecy, which is
Speaker 1: pretty phenomenal, and they had a huge burden, which is
Speaker 1: the flip side to cryptography. If you've intercepted a message
Speaker 1: and you've successfully deciphered it, and you now know what
Speaker 1: that information is, how do you act on that? Because
Speaker 1: if you act on it in a way that reveals
Speaker 1: to the enemy that you have understood what their messages are,
Speaker 1: they are going to take efforts to change the way
Speaker 1: that they are encoding things, thus putting you back to
Speaker 1: square one. As long as your enemy feels that their
Speaker 1: code is unbreakable, you're in a great position because they're
Speaker 1: not going to take any more precautions with it. Otherwise
Speaker 1: they can just develop a new machine, developed a more
Speaker 1: difficult code. And yeah, like you said, you're back at
Speaker 1: square one, then yes, and it is. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: just it's it's hard to think about because you know
Speaker 1: that a lot of these messages had life or death
Speaker 1: consequences exactly, and they had to take very careful consideration
Speaker 1: of how to act on it so that they could
Speaker 1: preserve as many lives as possible without tipping their hand.
Speaker 1: Was it information that could have been procured from some
Speaker 1: other sources aside from breaking the code or how important
Speaker 1: was it? Fortunately for the Allies, the Germans were extremely
Speaker 1: confident that the Enigma code was unbreakable. And I think
Speaker 1: the only way that they would have I think, I
Speaker 1: think what their normal routine was the Germans this is
Speaker 1: would be that if they felt that the code was endangered,
Speaker 1: they would issue new codebooks and they would have a
Speaker 1: new set of codebooks go out to the field rather
Speaker 1: than scrap the system and start with something new, so
Speaker 1: they'd stick with the system. They would just say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: what's what is at risk? Here are the physical codebooks
Speaker 1: that tell people what settings they need to have the
Speaker 1: Enigma machine on. And I didn't really talk about but
Speaker 1: the recipient of the message. To to de cipher a
Speaker 1: message from the the coded one, you would give the
Speaker 1: the ciphered message to a typist who would have their
Speaker 1: own Enigma machines set up just like the first one,
Speaker 1: they pressed the first letter, so if that A was
Speaker 1: a QUE, they would press Q and the the A
Speaker 1: light bulb lights up and so then you would have
Speaker 1: a second person taking down the flat text message exactly. UM.
Speaker 1: And I kind of was interested that the secrecy for
Speaker 1: all of this really extended beyond the war to the
Speaker 1: the BOMBA machines were all destroyed on Churchill's orders. After
Speaker 1: the war. I read one account of one of the
Speaker 1: women who had worked on the machines at Bletchley Park
Speaker 1: and talking about how her crew just happily destroyed them
Speaker 1: because they were so temperamental. They were just glad to
Speaker 1: see them go. That's an unusual story either. There are
Speaker 1: a lot of stories about destroy void cryptography machines because
Speaker 1: it was just considered to be too dangerous to let
Speaker 1: that information out further technology that could still be useful.
Speaker 1: Although today, of course, most of these machines have been rebuilt.
Speaker 1: You can see a lot of them if you visit
Speaker 1: Bletchley Park, which I think is cool that they've They've
Speaker 1: gone to the trouble of illustrating these because if you
Speaker 1: watch a video of one, it's a little easier too
Speaker 1: to comprehend than if you're just trying to read about
Speaker 1: it or hearing about it too, to see exactly how
Speaker 1: they were right. And there's some software out there as
Speaker 1: well that simulates a lot of these different machines so
Speaker 1: that you could type in a message and it would
Speaker 1: come out as a ciphered message. And again you have
Speaker 1: a friend who has that same software running, and you
Speaker 1: tell them, all right, set your software to this setting
Speaker 1: and run this message through and see what you get.
Speaker 1: And it might say, you know, you are a poopy head.
Speaker 1: It's all the messages I get from Chris all the time.
Speaker 1: It's really worth worth coding. Yeah, it takes a lot
Speaker 1: of effort to get that across. Another thing, though, is
Speaker 1: Enigma kind of gets all the glory. I'd say, you know,
Speaker 1: it's the only with if we were saying earlier that
Speaker 1: it's probably when most people are familiar with, and it
Speaker 1: might also be the only German code that people are
Speaker 1: familiar with. Sure, and it's not the only German code
Speaker 1: by a long shot. You wanted to speak specifically to
Speaker 1: the Lawrenz machines, which the Lawrence machine was interesting. It
Speaker 1: was a steam powered machine, so a little bit different
Speaker 1: and also the kind of old school little steam punky,
Speaker 1: little steam punky. Uh. It actually would send a message
Speaker 1: over telephone wire, over a telegraph wire, um, and you
Speaker 1: would have two machines set up where you would type
Speaker 1: in a message onto one machine. It encodes it using
Speaker 1: an ex or algorithm. And I to to explain that
Speaker 1: would probably take an entire podcast on its own, but
Speaker 1: just just to say that each letter is a symbol
Speaker 1: assigned a certain binary value, and then there's a key
Speaker 1: that also has a binary value. You add those two
Speaker 1: values together, it creates a third value that becomes the
Speaker 1: ciphered text. So as long as the other machine again
Speaker 1: has the right key, uh, then you can decipher it.
Speaker 1: And again the Germans were very confident about this. They thought, well,
Speaker 1: we've got this. The key is is this this role
Speaker 1: of tape. Essentially that both sides, both the sender and
Speaker 1: the recipient, they have identical strips of tape that have
Speaker 1: these values in it. The h the coded message gets
Speaker 1: sent across the wire, they run the tape through the
Speaker 1: receiving machine and then they get the plain text information.
Speaker 1: Thinking that no one in between would ever be able
Speaker 1: to crack that code, so there wasn't a whole lot
Speaker 1: of fear about intercepting those messages either on the side
Speaker 1: of the Germans, but there should have been. There should
Speaker 1: have been, I mean Lorenz who have used for just
Speaker 1: the most important information. It was reserved for high command
Speaker 1: for Hitler. Kind of ironic if you think about how
Speaker 1: they were so confident with Enigma that they wanted this
Speaker 1: extra code, but it was eventually broken by the machine.
Speaker 1: Colossus and um Letzley Park had a quote, and I
Speaker 1: kind of wanted to get your opinion on this. They
Speaker 1: called it the world's first practical electronic digital information processing machine,
Speaker 1: a forerunner of today's computers. Yes, it was the first
Speaker 1: of that nature. Uh, you can look at any act
Speaker 1: which was not yet built. It was not finished until
Speaker 1: um and all the other preceding computers were electro mechanical,
Speaker 1: meaning that there were actually gears in parts that moved,
Speaker 1: not just electronic circuits created by either wires you know
Speaker 1: today we think of microchips. Back in the day, we're
Speaker 1: talking about actual physical wires running to and fro and everywhere.
Speaker 1: That's why these machines tended to be the size of
Speaker 1: fairly sized room. Colossus is an apt term. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: were there were ten of them and they were huge. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's perfectly accurate. It is definitely a predecessor to today's computer.
Speaker 1: And of course, just as you would imagine today's computer,
Speaker 1: the computer that's on your desktop, perhaps the computer that
Speaker 1: you have in a pocket or in a bag near
Speaker 1: you right now, far more powerful than Colossus. And I
Speaker 1: watched the video of Colossus, you know, recommending these two
Speaker 1: folks to to check them out and kind of get
Speaker 1: a better feel for how these things look and how
Speaker 1: they work. It reminded me almost of a workout machine,
Speaker 1: partly because of the tapes all wrapped around the little reels,
Speaker 1: and that combined with a wall of electronics, it really
Speaker 1: does take up an entire room. So that's amazing to
Speaker 1: to think that that is a computer predecessor. Yep, yep.
Speaker 1: And again it was there to simulate these Lorenz machines
Speaker 1: and try and crack what those codes were, and it
Speaker 1: was a phenomenal achievement as far as technology is concerned. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we've probably discussed Germany pretty thorough lead by now,
Speaker 1: so we're gonna move over to Japan. And one thing
Speaker 1: that I found really fascinating was that Japanese communications had
Speaker 1: been monitored by the United States long long before World
Speaker 1: War Two began, right, more than a decade before, and
Speaker 1: Japan was not aware of that for quite a long
Speaker 1: time too, But that that tends to be the best way.
Speaker 1: That's usually how it happens, if you're doing everything correctly,
Speaker 1: if you're doing things how you should. So, yeah, the
Speaker 1: American said started screening Japanese telegrams between diplomats in November
Speaker 1: nineteen one. And these were really simple messages, so nothing
Speaker 1: like what we've been talking about with the Enigma. They
Speaker 1: were easy to break, and they gave the Cipher Bureau,
Speaker 1: which was the name of this UM code breaking organization
Speaker 1: in the US at the time and its director, Herbert Yardley,
Speaker 1: access to a lot of useful information. So it's diplomatic information,
Speaker 1: it's not military, but still gives you some helpful stuff
Speaker 1: if you're negotiating treaties, you know, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: Definitely a little inside peak, some insider trading on a
Speaker 1: grand scale, that's what this is. But by the late
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties, this uh to do this, they relied on
Speaker 1: domestic cable companies in information, which is something kind of
Speaker 1: relevant to this. But by the late nineteen twenties, use
Speaker 1: of that information and plus monitoring of airwaves started to
Speaker 1: become kind of distasteful, frowned upon, and so eventually the
Speaker 1: cipher Bureau dissolved and Yardley, out of work trying to
Speaker 1: make some money during the Great Depression, decided to write
Speaker 1: a book and write a series of articles for the
Speaker 1: Saturday Evening Post on codes and code breaking. His experiences
Speaker 1: experience monitoring the information coming out of Japan, and it
Speaker 1: sets some shock waves going through the world that this
Speaker 1: information was so easily available. This this kind of proves
Speaker 1: why it's important to keep that secret parts secret because
Speaker 1: once once it got out that this was very easy
Speaker 1: for them to break the codes. The message that sends
Speaker 1: is we need to look at how we are ciphering
Speaker 1: our messages, how we're encoding things, and try to introduce
Speaker 1: as much randomness as possible. And randomness is what makes
Speaker 1: codes so difficult to break. You know, once you start
Speaker 1: being able to detect patterns, it's game over because it's
Speaker 1: just a matter of time before you can start, before
Speaker 1: you have to before that code gets cracked. So you
Speaker 1: want to avoid patterns as much as possible and have
Speaker 1: as much randomness in there as possible. But here's the trick.
Speaker 1: Random is hard. Computers are not truly good at producing
Speaker 1: random numbers. They are pseudo random because they're still following
Speaker 1: a set of rules in order to create random numbers.
Speaker 1: And on top of that, there needs to be someone
Speaker 1: else out there who has the same set of random
Speaker 1: data so they can decode the message you send them.
Speaker 1: So there's going to be at least one copy of
Speaker 1: whatever random, quote unquote random message you create or random
Speaker 1: key you create in order to cipher a message. But
Speaker 1: that was what really got countries around the world thinking,
Speaker 1: how can we create more of a random feel for
Speaker 1: our encoding technology, the random Yeah, if we don't, then
Speaker 1: our messages get cracked. We might as well just be
Speaker 1: sending plain text. It would be a lot easier and
Speaker 1: a lot faster. And so that did sort of lead
Speaker 1: to a shift in adopting these more complex mechanical machines,
Speaker 1: like we've talked about already with the Enigma, which was
Speaker 1: from the twenties, adopting machines more like that rather than
Speaker 1: these old style codes right right, And the Japanese chose
Speaker 1: a slightly different approach. Their machines did not look like
Speaker 1: the Enigma and did not. While they were able to
Speaker 1: generate randomness in a very similar way that the Enigma
Speaker 1: machine did, so the outcome was very similar, the actual
Speaker 1: mechanics were different. To explain, you want to know how Okay,
Speaker 1: So it's an electro magnetic device and it's called it's
Speaker 1: a step switching device as opposed to rotors, but very
Speaker 1: similar in that if you encode a character, there is
Speaker 1: a step switch that moves the encoder one step further
Speaker 1: so that the next key you press gets coded to
Speaker 1: a different one than it would be if it had
Speaker 1: been the first key. That sounds really complicated, but really again, well,
Speaker 1: we'll stick with the a's and the a's right that
Speaker 1: that you're coding two a's in a row. Obviously this
Speaker 1: would not be the case with the Japanese typewriter. But
Speaker 1: if you press the letter A, then the first step
Speaker 1: would be to encode that to whatever the setting has it.
Speaker 1: So we'll go with H and then the second that
Speaker 1: that would then step up the code a step. You
Speaker 1: press A again, it would then code to a different
Speaker 1: letter so z and very much the same way as
Speaker 1: the Enigma machine, but the actual parts didn't move the
Speaker 1: same way. Whereas the Enigma had these rotors. The Japanese
Speaker 1: typewriters used this this electromantic step system, and and they
Speaker 1: had interesting code names they did. So. The first of
Speaker 1: these electromagnetic code machines created by the Japanese was called
Speaker 1: the cipher Machine Type A. It was known as red
Speaker 1: to the U s, and the code it produced was
Speaker 1: known as red um. That code was fully broken though
Speaker 1: in nineteen seven, with a clue from one word the
Speaker 1: Japanese word for and essentially was enough of a enough
Speaker 1: of a hint for them to break code red. Yeah. Again,
Speaker 1: it's one of those things where they're looking for repetition
Speaker 1: and patterns, and if it's a word that's used a lot,
Speaker 1: and if you're if you don't have enough steps there,
Speaker 1: if you're key repeats fairly frequently, then you run the
Speaker 1: danger of someone using frequency analysis on your message and
Speaker 1: figuring out what it means. That was one of the
Speaker 1: things that the Enigma was so good about was that
Speaker 1: because there were so many possible combinations, that unless your
Speaker 1: message was incredibly long and i'm talking novel length, then
Speaker 1: you're not going to have to worry about the pattern
Speaker 1: forming because you are not going to run out of
Speaker 1: those variations. Well, and another problem too is that the
Speaker 1: Japanese were sending several standard messages with their messages, so
Speaker 1: well we should go back to So they did decipher
Speaker 1: the code sent out by RED, and by that point,
Speaker 1: though by night messages through RED announced that there was
Speaker 1: another machine. That's probably a mistake too, to announce your
Speaker 1: new machine through your old one that has been compromised.
Speaker 1: And that new announcement was for the alphabetical typewriter, which
Speaker 1: was codenamed Purple. That's probably the more famous of the two. Yes,
Speaker 1: Purple is definitely more famous. And I read although from
Speaker 1: a source that I consider questionable, so this could be apocryphal.
Speaker 1: I want to proceed my my message with that that
Speaker 1: the reason why I was called purple is because that was,
Speaker 1: in fact the color of the binders that the United
Speaker 1: States used to hold all the intercepted and deciphered messages.
Speaker 1: A good story, yeah, I mean it seems legit. As
Speaker 1: they say on the interwebs. I do have to say, well,
Speaker 1: researching this though code read code Purple, I just kept
Speaker 1: on getting a lot of information on air quality. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but also very fitting for Atlanta. It is uh and
Speaker 1: they the the United States was able to crack these
Speaker 1: codes too. Um. The purple codes were not as sophisticated
Speaker 1: as the Enigma machines were. Uh. And the United States
Speaker 1: cracked them. And again, these are mostly diplomatic messages, they're
Speaker 1: not military messages. But the United States is keeping tabs
Speaker 1: on what's going on in the in the Pacific, and
Speaker 1: they called their interception and deciphered messages. Uh. Magic, because
Speaker 1: that's what it seems like when you're able to decode something.
Speaker 1: I guess very tinker tailor soldier spy. Yes it is. Yes,
Speaker 1: Gary Oldman would have had a lot of work during
Speaker 1: this time, and it took him a while to decode it.
Speaker 1: That we shouldn't make it sound like it was just
Speaker 1: an easy tak No, it took quite some time. It
Speaker 1: took more than a year a year and a half
Speaker 1: of hard work to crack the code. But they were
Speaker 1: able to figure that out. Um. And Uh, it's interesting
Speaker 1: the person who discovered the correlation was someone that you
Speaker 1: might not consider it first considering the time period. Right,
Speaker 1: so we're in the middle of it was in September
Speaker 1: n So World War two is is going on. The
Speaker 1: Americans are not really they're just really monitoring at the moment.
Speaker 1: The person who who discovered the correlation in a in
Speaker 1: a couple of messages which was enough to allow us
Speaker 1: to break the code, was Genevieve Grossian. So a woman
Speaker 1: was the one who discovered the correlation. And again, it's
Speaker 1: one of those things where we often overlook the people
Speaker 1: who first make these these uh discoveries, because you know,
Speaker 1: the big story about breaking the code is interesting, but
Speaker 1: sometimes we lose sight of the people. And I thought, well,
Speaker 1: that's someone that we should know about clearly, because this
Speaker 1: is someone who was able to find the first stepping
Speaker 1: stone that allowed us to crack the code. Alan Turing's
Speaker 1: getting his moment. There's plenty to go around. Um, so
Speaker 1: you know the timeline. By this point, you're probably thinking, well,
Speaker 1: if Purple was cracked in ninety, um, what about Pearl Harbor?
Speaker 1: How much was known? They were diplomatic messages, so there's
Speaker 1: no evidence that they were receiving information about Pearl Harbor.
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean though, there wasn't some pretty important information
Speaker 1: that was gained from understanding Purple. Yeah, there was. There's
Speaker 1: still some confusion and there are plenty of conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: about how much information was gleaned from Purple that could
Speaker 1: have prevented, could have at least prevented or at least
Speaker 1: prepared everyone in Hawaii for this attack. And uh, there
Speaker 1: was no specific message ever intercepted and decipher that had
Speaker 1: anything to do with a specific attack on Pearl Harbor,
Speaker 1: according to all official records. And again, conspiracy theorists might
Speaker 1: disagree with that ben In here, maybe we have to
Speaker 1: go with what history gives us, right, and what history
Speaker 1: says is that there was no way of knowing directly
Speaker 1: through the intercepted messages about the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Speaker 1: History would have unfolded a very different way. I'm sure
Speaker 1: had there been. What's ironic is that some of the
Speaker 1: most important information that was gleaned from these messages was
Speaker 1: about Germany rather than Japan. Ironic because of how how
Speaker 1: proud they were of the Enigma. All this information was
Speaker 1: really getting out through Purple anyway, that probably would have
Speaker 1: made the Germans a little kind of upset. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: Japanese ambassador to Berlin, a man named hiroshi Oshima. He
Speaker 1: was pretty descriptive while talking about what was going on
Speaker 1: in Germany and what the Nazi defenses were like and
Speaker 1: all that information was being picked up through through magic um,
Speaker 1: so a lot of information that ultimately helped prepare for
Speaker 1: the D Day invasion. So Pearl Harbor is off the table,
Speaker 1: possibly unless we're going to go conspiracy theory on it.
Speaker 1: But d JA so still an important code to have broken. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's amazing to me when you look at
Speaker 1: some of the mistakes that were made, because often mistakes
Speaker 1: are the only reason why certain codes were ever broken
Speaker 1: in the first place. Either there were mistakes and procedure
Speaker 1: where someone has set up a really secure system, but
Speaker 1: the people part of the system isn't so secure. My
Speaker 1: favorite example of that is somebody making a mistake in
Speaker 1: the typing of the message and instead of resetting everything
Speaker 1: so that the code is secure again, just typing out
Speaker 1: a corrected message on the same setting, right, which makes
Speaker 1: for just very slight differences between the two messages, right,
Speaker 1: And that that was huge. That was an enormous help.
Speaker 1: I mean, the protocol for that was if you were
Speaker 1: to send a message and you made a mistake while
Speaker 1: in ciphering it, that you were supposed to set it
Speaker 1: to a new whatever machine was involved, you were supposed
Speaker 1: to set to the next start over, start from scratch,
Speaker 1: Start from scratch with a new setting, so that all
Speaker 1: the message is going to be completely different because that
Speaker 1: way the Allies don't know that it's the same message.
Speaker 1: But by setting it back to the setting that was
Speaker 1: for the first time you try to transmit it, that
Speaker 1: means two copies of this message go out and that's
Speaker 1: enough for the Allies to say, wait a minute, this
Speaker 1: was in coomat. We can figure this out and we
Speaker 1: can start working on what has gone wrong for them
Speaker 1: and right for us. So human error is a is
Speaker 1: a big part of these codes ultimately being cracked. It
Speaker 1: seems ultimately yes, I would say that things everything from
Speaker 1: using common salutations or a common prefix to whatever the
Speaker 1: message is, that would often give the the analysts enough
Speaker 1: information to work on to start cracking a code. Even
Speaker 1: a weather report. The standards between a weather report the
Speaker 1: numbers or directions of wind might be different, but it's
Speaker 1: going to have a lot of the same vocabulary and
Speaker 1: that weather report information. That's also a good point because
Speaker 1: one thing that the British thought of while they were
Speaker 1: trying to capture Enigma machines so they could get Enigma
Speaker 1: machines and codebooks so that they be you know, the
Speaker 1: Enigma machine was was fairly portable, fairly in the sense
Speaker 1: that you could put one on a ship with much
Speaker 1: The Lorens not portable. Uh, And the Purple machines were
Speaker 1: not terribly portable either. In fact, uh, they just it
Speaker 1: was once you once you built one, that's pretty much
Speaker 1: where it stayed. But the Enigma machine was different. You
Speaker 1: could actually move those around with effort. They were not
Speaker 1: It wasn't a laptop, but it The British figured out
Speaker 1: that the Germans were probably using Enigma codes not just
Speaker 1: on official military craft, but also on things like ships
Speaker 1: that were taking weather measurements, so weather research ships that
Speaker 1: are not military ships. And they thought, well, why are
Speaker 1: we focusing on capturing a German navy vessel when we
Speaker 1: could capture one of these weather ships and get hold
Speaker 1: of the code books that way. And in fact, that's
Speaker 1: what a lot that's how a lot of the codes
Speaker 1: were broken. They found code books that were accurate for
Speaker 1: that that time period and we're able to start cracking codes.
Speaker 1: So that's another instance of a mistake where you know,
Speaker 1: you have to balance out who gets access to your
Speaker 1: secret message at different levels of codes. Yeah, yeah, it
Speaker 1: was because, again, if the machines had worked exactly correctly,
Speaker 1: and that all the people had done what they were
Speaker 1: supposed to do perfectly, and if the codebooks had remained
Speaker 1: perfectly secure, the Enigma code was uncrackable. Next time, though,
Speaker 1: we are going to be talking about some truly uncrackable codes.
Speaker 1: We'll be talking about the Allies use of cryptography during
Speaker 1: World War Two, So it'll it'll take us full circle
Speaker 1: from this discussion of Enigma and Purple and Lawrens and
Speaker 1: get into some codes that aren't based on machines, which
Speaker 1: is a pretty huge difference. Indeed more portable for sure,
Speaker 1: So that'll be next time. I don't know, do you
Speaker 1: have any other comments were for the use of codes
Speaker 1: by the Axis. I think I think we've really covered
Speaker 1: it pretty well. What central thing to me is something
Speaker 1: that I'll talk about more in our next episode about
Speaker 1: how this sort of technology has evolved in how we
Speaker 1: use it today. But that will be a good bookend.
Speaker 1: I think that it will be how we wrap things up.
Speaker 1: So if you want to let us know your ideas
Speaker 1: about the access use of codes or just codes and
Speaker 1: spies and all sorts of things during World War two.
Speaker 1: You can email us. We're at history podcast at how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. We're also on Twitter at Misston History,
Speaker 1: and we are on Facebook and gosh, I'm sure we
Speaker 1: have articles on codes, don't we. Oh yeah, I wrote one.
Speaker 1: Did you write one? Well, then you go ahead and
Speaker 1: find us off. Oh yeah. So go to how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com and look up code breaking because that
Speaker 1: was one of my earliest articles. And I've been here
Speaker 1: for nearly six years and started the same week. Yeah
Speaker 1: and uh, And to this day it remains one of
Speaker 1: my favorites because it was just such a fascinating world.
Speaker 1: And I even include in that article a code that
Speaker 1: you can break, so fun, get out your your um
Speaker 1: cereal box sort of decoders and go for it. All right,
Speaker 1: pretty much all you need. So How Code Breaking Works
Speaker 1: by Jonathan Strickland at www dot how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: M for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Speaker 1: Is it how stuff works dot com.