The Enigma Machine and How It Worked
The Enigma Machine and How it Worked.-Ibrahim Rashid
What is the Enigma Machine: The enigma machine was a coding device that was used by the Germans during World War 2 to write, send, and decipher encrypted messages.
How did it work: The enigma machine was a very complicated device. On the inside of the machine there were three rotors that contained all 26 letters of the alphabet. What would happen was that when someone would press a letter on the keyboard, a different letter would pop up on the paper, such as A for E, D for G, F for Z, and so on. These substitutions occur because of the positions of the rotors on the inside of the machine. The rotors are first situated at any random letter in the alphabet and when the button is pressed, the letter that is at the beginning of the rotor is put onto the paper. Then if the same letter were to be pressed again, a different letter would appear because the rotor will have changed position. The fully typed and encoded message would be printed out and mailed to the person it was designated to and then that person would put in that code into their enigma machine and that machine would decipher the encoded message.
Why did the Enigma machine work?: The enigma machine worked so well because there were so many different combinations of rotors that could have been used because each rotor had a different arbitrary sorting of letters. There were so many combinations for the enigma machine and its rotors. Things became much more complicated when German scientists began to use 5 different rotors which could fit into only 3 slots, which increased the amount of combinations that could be used in the enigma machine. With all these rotors and so few slots that were used in the enigma machine, there were countless possibilities of combinations to choose from. When people were decrypting the codes they were sent, they had to make sure they put the rotors in the exact same position as the person who sent it. This would
What is the Enigma Machine: The enigma machine was a coding device that was used by the Germans during World War 2 to write, send, and decipher encrypted messages.
How did it work: The enigma machine was a very complicated device. On the inside of the machine there were three rotors that contained all 26 letters of the alphabet. What would happen was that when someone would press a letter on the keyboard, a different letter would pop up on the paper, such as A for E, D for G, F for Z, and so on. These substitutions occur because of the positions of the rotors on the inside of the machine. The rotors are first situated at any random letter in the alphabet and when the button is pressed, the letter that is at the beginning of the rotor is put onto the paper. Then if the same letter were to be pressed again, a different letter would appear because the rotor will have changed position. The fully typed and encoded message would be printed out and mailed to the person it was designated to and then that person would put in that code into their enigma machine and that machine would decipher the encoded message.
Why did the Enigma machine work?: The enigma machine worked so well because there were so many different combinations of rotors that could have been used because each rotor had a different arbitrary sorting of letters. There were so many combinations for the enigma machine and its rotors. Things became much more complicated when German scientists began to use 5 different rotors which could fit into only 3 slots, which increased the amount of combinations that could be used in the enigma machine. With all these rotors and so few slots that were used in the enigma machine, there were countless possibilities of combinations to choose from. When people were decrypting the codes they were sent, they had to make sure they put the rotors in the exact same position as the person who sent it. This would