On June 23, 1912, a baby named Alan Mathison Turing was born in London. From the start, his teachers said he was strange - he taught himself how to read in three weeks at age six and would scribble math problems on his school napkins. By his early twenties at Cambridge University, he had written a paper imagining a machine that could solve any problem if you gave it the right instructions. He called it a "universal computing machine." Today we just call it a computer.
When World War II broke out, the British government quietly asked Alan to come work at a secret country mansion called Bletchley Park. The Germans were sending coded messages with a machine called Enigma, which had so many possible settings that even doing 100,000 guesses a second wouldn't crack it in a human lifetime. Alan and his team built a clattering electric machine called the Bombe that could test settings much faster. By 1942, they were reading Hitler's secret messages almost as quickly as his generals were. Historians later guessed that the work at Bletchley Park shortened the war by about two years and saved millions of lives. Almost no one knew. The work was kept secret for thirty years.
After the war, Alan helped design one of Britain's first real computers and asked one of the great big questions: can a machine ever truly think? He died in 1954, and only decades later did the world finally find out what he had done. In 2013, Queen Elizabeth II officially pardoned him for the unfair laws used against him. Today his face is on the British 50-pound note - a quiet thank-you from a country he secretly saved.
