Origin of the German Enigma Machine
The machine was originally patented by Arthur Scherbius, a German engineer in 1919 for business security. It was improved to be more complex for the German Navy (1926), Air Force (1928), and Army (1935).
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Design of the German Enigma Machine
"...the machine had a number of manually adjustable parts and the cryptographer needed to know not only how the machine was constructed and how it worked but also how these various movable parts were set by the operator at the moment when he began transmitting each particular message. The parts were adjusted every so often..."
- Peter Calvocoressi
Air Intelligence Officer at Bletchley Park 1935
"...there was a choice from the 60 possible wheel orders, the 17,576 ring-settings for each wheel order, and over 150 million million stecker-pairings. So the total number of possible daily keys was about 159 million million million."
- Alan Stripp
Cryptanalyst at Bletchley Park