A 1941 Enigma I Cipher Machine Sold at Bonhams for More Than £200,000

An Enigma I cipher machine sold for more than £200,000

The auction house Bonhams put the machine, made for the German army around 1941, up for sale in its online auction "Espionage: Fact and Fiction".

The Enigma was an electromechanical machine that turned the plain text of military dispatches into cipher. The operator typed the text on a keyboard, the signal passed through rotating wired discs (rotors) and a plugboard with patch cables, and the letters of the enciphered message lit up on a lampboard. The pattern of encryption depended on the choice of rotors, their positions and the connections on the plugboard, so the codebreaker had to do more than understand how the machine was built: he had to reconstruct settings that changed constantly.

The breaking of the Enigma was a joint undertaking of several countries. Polish cryptologists were the first to learn to read its messages and in 1939 passed their findings to Britain; French intelligence made its contribution, and the work was then continued by Alan Turing and his colleagues at the British codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park