In 1943 the Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers, working with Max Newman's mathematicians at Bletchley Park, designed Colossus to break the Lorenz cipher used by the German High Command, which was harder than Enigma. The first machine, with 1,600 vacuum tubes, was working in early 1944 and read paper tape at 5,000 characters a second; the improved Mark 2 was ready on 1 June 1944, just before D-Day, and ten machines were built. They helped Allied commanders to know that Hitler had been taken in by the deception. The machines were destroyed after the war and kept secret until the 1970s.
Before and after
- 23 January 1944Death of Edvard Munch
- from 24 January 1944 to 17 February 1944Battle of the Korsun–Cherkassy Pocket
- February 1944Construction of O'Hare International Airport
- from 1 February 1944 to 14 May 1948Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine
- February 1944Colossus, the first programmable electronic computer, goes into operation
- from 2 February 1944 to 10 August 1944Battle for Narva
- 9 February 1944Birth of Alice Walker
- from 17 February 1944 to 23 February 1944Battle of Eniwetok
- 28 February 1944Huta Pieniacka massacre
More in Science & technology
- 1931Kurt Godel proves his incompleteness theorems
- 1933Karl Jansky detects radio waves from the Milky Way
- 4 March 1936First flight of LZ 129 Hindenburg
- 1 February 1942Launch of Voice of America
- October 1943Streptomycin, the first antibiotic that works against tuberculosis, is discovered
- 1944Avery, MacLeod and McCarty show that DNA carries genes
The era
This moment belongs to the Modern era (1914 CE to 1945 CE), world wars and a changing world. You can also browse everything in the 20th century.