Engineering Talks – Colossus & the Breaking of Lorenz

By the end of World War Two 10 Colossus machines were working around the clock to find the start wheels of the Lorenz-encrypted messages.

These machines made a huge impact by accelerating the code-breaking and enabling many more messages to be deciphered and it is sometimes said that the Allies may have been able to read some messages even before Hitler’s generals had seen them.

This film – by the The National Museum of Computing – shows how the world’s first electronic computer was built during World War II but kept secret for more than 30 years!

Professor Brian Randell tells the story about how he stumbled across a reference to its existence which eventually led to the UK government lifting the veil of secrecy surrounding this pioneering computer in 1975.

Over the coming months, we will try to feature interesting talks and lectures that relate to Engineering.

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A list of new talks you might be interested is available below.

• Engineering Talks – Neil Turok Public Lecture: The Astonishing Simplicity of Everything
• Engineering Talks – Thomas Krauss on “Technologies for the Future”
• Engineering Talks – Elon Musk on “Making Humans a Multi Planetary Species”
• Engineering Talks – Dr Steve Melia on “Urban Transport Without the Hot Air”
• Engineering Talks – Jay Foreman on “The History of Every London Airport”
• Engineering Talks – The first heart Tal Golesworthy saved was his own
• Engineering Talks – Colossus & the Breaking of Lorenz
• Engineering Talks – Ruth Amos on The Problem, How I Solved It, and Where it Has Taken Me
• Engineering Talks – River Monitoring in Cold Regions