Alan Turing – The Delilah Project

The popular film portrail is that Alan cracked the Enigma alone. Alan did contribute, particularly to cracking the harder naval variant of the Enigma, but there were other notable contributors who get less limelight such as Gordon Welchman.

By mid-war Turing is sent to America and then put to work on a secure telephone system called Delilah at another government site. No real hurry, no big resources. At first he's alone, then eventually he's assigned a (brilliant) student as a helper.

Meanwhile, at Bletchley, others are building the Colossus computer to crack another German cipher.

They are building what many credit as the first computer, and Turing will have influenced that heavily, but he's basically not leading that effort.

So from mid-war onwards it's basically Turing shut away in a shed where he won't distract people too much. It's almost like Turing was hard to work with!? :D