Bletchley Park
An overdue post may I say, but this experience quite different in comparison to the other locations I visited. For one, this was a part of my "Wider Skills Week" at my college, for maths and science. Let me just say... My only real intention was to go to Thorpe Park - Don't even ask, but hey who would decline the offer to go to Thorpe Park... Yes I understand everything with Alton Towers but still. Honestly, I don't even take any sciences and I was planning to drop Maths depending on my grades...
Anyways, enough about me! What I knew about Bletchley Park revolved around my knowledge of Alan Turing from the Imitation Game (I recommend you should watch it, it's pretty interesting and you learn a lot). I think the main thing I knew about Bletchley Park was about the enigma code. Honestly, I didn't know much but it was interesting how the system worked and how the British (and probably allies) overcame the Axis' form of communication to each other through the enigma code.
If you want to find out more about the history of Bletchley Park you can check out the website here:
So how did the actual enigma machine work?
Well I can tell you that there are different aspects of the enigma machines for example: the rotors, there are different rotor settings. There are a choice of 5 rotors, in which you choose 3 - therefore there are 60 different combinations for the rotors. As for the rotor settings there are 26 options on each rotor, therefore a total of 17,576 combinations. As well as the rotors there is also a featured plugboard with 10 leads available (aka 10 pairs of letters connected) so in total 150,738,274,937,250 combinations. And finally, how many number of different ways would you be able to set it up each day? Around 159 million million million (aka a trillion).
Right... Enough numbers, even I was sitting there in the classroom looking blankly as all these calculations were thrown to my face. Trust me, it was those times where you just nodded and pretended you understood what was going but really you were crying internally...
I realised, currently this blog posts seems incredibly intellectual so I'm just going to tone it down because even I'm struggling to process all these numbers and historical facts. So other than discussing about the enigma code, we also managed to have a tour around Bletchley Park during our free time. For lunch we walked past a really lovely lake - honestly aesthetics on pointe right there.
After lunch, we went off for our free time, and I think my aim was to visit the mansion in Bletchley Park which was where the Imitation Game was set. There was a room allocated with all of the different props and costumes used with a screen on the side featuring a video of Benedict Cumberbatch who plays Alan Turing in the Imitation Game. There were also other rooms inside the mansion including an old-fashioned library.
Afterwards we went to go and look at the "bombe" room. Honestly I would explain to you how it works but even I got confused reading it up, it's much easier to experience it in person to understand because I attempted to google it and summarise but I'm more confused than ever... Here are some images instead of the bombe aha.
Overall, it was an interesting experience, I probably learnt a lot from it, especially about the enigma code and about the history of the war in relevance to the enigma code.
Thank you for reading, I have to say this is something quite different to what I usually write about as it's not really an event more of an educational trip aha.
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