[3609] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Tommy Flowers, Engineer who cracked German communications, dead, at, 92
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Knowles)
Mon Nov 9 13:58:31 1998
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 08:39:54 -0800 (PST)
From: William Knowles <erehwon@kizmiaz.dis.org>
To: DC-Stuff <dc-stuff@dis.org>, aaa-list@lists.netlink.co.uk
cc: cryptography@c2.net
LONDON (November 8, 1998 3:51 p.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com)
Tommy Flowers, who developed a pioneering computer that cracked
German military codes in World War II, is dead at 92.
Flowers died from heart failure at home in London on Oct. 28,
his son Kenneth said Sunday.
An engineering graduate of the University of London, Flowers
joined the British Post Office, then responsible for all national
communications, in the 1930s and experimented in electronic
telephone transmissions.
In World War II, he was sent to Bletchley Park, 50 miles from
London where mathematicians, cryptographers and other experts
worked on breaking German military codes.
Flowers secretly developed Colossus, a one-ton machine that
was able to unscramble coded messages electronically rather
than mechanically as had been done.
"Colossus had all the characteristics of the computer although
it wasn't thought of as a computer at the time," Kenneth Flowers
said in a telephone interview. "It could think and made decisions.
Up to then these machines had been used just to make numerical
calculations."
By the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, Flowers had produced another
Colossus that worked five times as fast as the original. By the end
of the war in 1945, 10 machines were in operation.
Thomas Harold Flowers, who was born in London on Dec. 22, 1905,
received an honor, Member of the British Empire, for his work in
the 1940s, but remained largely unknown to the wider public because
the work was kept secret until the '70s.
After the war, he returned to the post office and tried to persuade
his superiors to use technology to produce an all-electronic phone
system.
"He spent 20 years trying to persuade them, but he wasn't
so successful because he couldn't tell them he had already
produced the machine," Kenneth Flowers said.
He did not tell his own family of his achievement and the
many lives it saved until long after the war.
"He told us he worked on something secret and important," his
son said. "They were allowed to tell that much in case their
wives wondered where they were. But until the '70s he never
said anything else. It was a point of honor really."
Bletchley Park is now a tourist attraction with a replica
of the Colossus.
In addition to Kenneth, Flowers is survived by his wife,
Eileen, son John, and three grandchildren.
The funeral was to be held Monday at Hendon Crematorium in
north London.
==
Some day, on the corporate balance sheet, there will be
an entry which reads, "Information"; for in most cases
the information is more valuable than the hardware which
processes it. -- Grace Murray Hopper
==
http://www.dis.org/erehwon/
