For codebreakers with the allied forces, it was more important a discovery than the Enigma machine, offering encryption for the Nazi command that, when cracked, would hasten the end of the second world war and lead to huge breakthroughs in modern computing.
Less than 80 years later, for a thrifty woman in Essex, the “telegram machine” was little more than a dusty old gadget languishing in the garden shed.
But after an eagle-eyed volunteer with the National Museum of Computing (NMC) spotted an ad on eBay this week, the extremely rare, military-issue Lorenz teleprinter has been saved and provides the latest piece in international efforts to rebuild Hitler’s complete encoding device.
After finding the component on the online auction site, and receiving a long-term loan of the Lorenz SZ42 cipher machine from the Norwegian Armed Forces Museum in Oslo, the NMC is now looking for the final parts to restore the encoder to working order.
“To do that we have to replace some missing components, in particular the drive motor – and it’s the drive motor that’s our next quest,” said John Whetter, a volunteer engineer with the NMC.
Whetter and his colleagues are calling for people across the country to search -read more
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