Alan Turing the voice encryption device we didn't know about

Alan Turing, one of the most famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to crack the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley Papers after his assistant Donald Bayley, who kept them until his death in 2020, reveal that Turing had created a working model of a portable voice encryption device. He even demonstrated it using a recording of Winston Churchill’s speech.

“Weighing just 39 kilograms, including its power supply,” Jack Copeland reports in an article for IEEE Spectrum , “Delilah could be in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack.”

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Turing’s work at Bletchley Park actually influenced the Delilah experiment he conducted at Hanslope Park. Turing drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had cracked at Bletchley. Not the famous Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former was based on Morse code, the latter used a 5-bit telegraphic code, which Copeland says “was a precursor to ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some radio amateurs.” SZ42 produced a secret key for telegraphic characters, with an identical key generated at both the sender and receiver. Since it could be done for text, Turing thought it could be done for sound…

The reason we don't know much about Delilah isn't because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasn't needed. By the time Turing built his device, the war was over. What was the point of a portable voice cipher unless you had important enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned.

Thus, funding for the project stopped and Turing's two-year experiment ended ingloriously, and the period when Turing worked as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote on his resume.

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George is still wondering what he is doing here….