Rare Turing notebooks from WWII saved for the nation

Rare notebooks of Alan Turing’s unpublished code-breaking work during the Second World War have been saved for the nation thanks to a charity campaign.

- ATHENA STAVROU

The British mathematician, credited with breaking the Enigma code, seldom preserved his own research notes, meaning evidence of his papers was often lost. But now a significant archive has been saved by a campaign spearheaded by the Friends of the Nations’ Libraries, after the government stepped in to stop its sale for £400,000 unless private funds were raised.

The handwritten notes document Turing’s “Delilah project”, which involved building a portable voice encoder to be used in military operations. He turned to the project in 1943 after his groundbreaking work on the Enigma machines at Bletchley Park.

With the help of the electrical engineer Donald Bayley he built a single prototype of the machine which could digitise and encipher speech for transmission across a telephone line.

The two men kept a logbook of the experiment’s results, alongside handwritten notes from lectures Turing gave to engineers at Hanslope Park, a secretive government communications centre near Milton Keynes.