Explanation: Alan Turing was a mathematician and computer scientist whose revolutionary work during WW2 helped the British shorten the war considerably by breaking (and thus having access to) Nazi coded messages.
A little over half a decade after the war, a chance break-in at his house led to him accidentally incriminating himself - by admitting to the presence of his boyfriend. This being the 1950s UK, the courts gave him a choice for the horrific crime of homosexuality - chemical castration, or several months in prison. Turing considered that he would not last in prison, and opted for the chemical treatment. Some time later, he bit into an apple laced with cyanide and died, which many consider to be an act of suicide (though it is still disputed, some believe it was genuinely an accident).
Wait a second, Alan Turing was a queer icon? I had no idea.
I cannot fathom how anyone can allow people to be punished for loving who they love, in a consenting relationship between two adults. What a terrible and tragic story. Fuck anyone who wants to punish people for doing something that doesn’t hurt anyone; for doing something that in fact is literally the direct opposite of hurting anyone. Like, fuck them to the core, and not in any nice way.
I’m not sure about that (the icon bit). I’ve gay friends who have been surprised that Turing was gay - personally I knew about it since I knew about Turing, but I was a nerd who was interested in the theory of computation. It’s only relative recently (with the popularity of unbelievably lousy character-assassination like “the Imitation Game”*) that he’s been more in the general public eye, I think.
- This is a shit film that represents the worse of pandering, and casts Turing in an appallingly poor light, whilst leaning into the “autistic savant” trope hard. It’s abysmal.
Apple laced with cyanide is an accident ??
Damm what a wild times. I would though, with my quite non-normal, reasoning capabilities it would have been done intentionally to murder someone…
Poor storage of laboratory chemicals is the alternative explanation. While plausible, suicide seems more likely to my eyes.
The story is at least semi-plausible, but Turing also still had friends in the right places (not enough to dig him out of the hole he got himself into with the local plod*) and there was a strong social taboo around suicide.
(* At the time there was good reason to believe that the end of the outlawing of homosexuality was just around the corner, so offering a genuine explanation was not necessarily Turing acting as such a naif as is often portrayed.)
Some have speculated that it’s the origin of the Apple logo but Jobs confirmed it wasn’t.
“Almost singlehandedly” is way off the mark. Welchman, Tutte - the place was filled with eccentric geniuses; it was the success of management as much as the individual that Bletchley saw so much success.
(“The story of Hut 6” is a good read on the subject. What comes across was that success was down to serendipity as well as hard work, and some remarkably enlightened leadership.)
It’s worth mentioning that German cryptologists had some considerable success cracking British codes as well, notably including the cyphers the Admiralty used to communicate with merchant ships in convoys during the first half of the war. This was a major factor behind Britain nearly losing the Battle of the Atlantic before they even had a chance to participate in the re-invasion of continental Europe in 1944.
Not to disregard Turing here as I believe he is still one of the greats of computing, but the idea that he “Almost Singlehandedly” did anything is to the discredit of the thousands of workers at Bletchley Park alongside him, and the Polish cryptographers who initially cracked several versions of Enigma in the 1930s and went on to teach the Bletchley how they did it.
Turing aside, the world simply treated gay people horribly altogether.
Gay men were victims of the holocaust much like many other groups but Germany wouldn’t recognize this until 4 decades later in the 1980s. We know what the British did to Turing but the U.S. acted similarly due to the Lavender Scare which compared gay people to communists and enacted its own witch hunts for them.
Can we stop the false notion that he did it on his own? It’s just not true. Not even close.
Arne Beurling however DID single-handedly Crack a T52 in 2 weeks with nothing but pen and paper.
He was singularly brilliant in coming up with the Turing Machine and contributing towards the Church Turing Thesis which are the foundations of all computer science. It is true that he did not crack enigma by himself but his scientific contributions shouldn’t be understated.
“And Türing answered another,” Rudy said.
“Who’s that?”
“It’s me,” Alan said. “But Rudy’s joking. ‘Turing’ doesn’t really have an umlaut in it.”
“He’s going to have an umlaut in him later tonight,” Rudy said, looking at Alan in a way that, in retrospect, years later, Lawrence would understand to have been smoldering.”
I couldn’t even believe Neal Stephenson wrote that.
And yeah, Alan Turing was awesome and he was treated horribly.
The Cryptonomicon is such a good book. I’m pretty sure I’ve read it 30 times now.
You know… what they call “the good ol’ days” they wax nostalgic about.
I just recently watched The Imitation Game for the first time. I dunno how accurate it is, but it was an amazing performance by Cumberbatch.
Historically speaking it’s a lazy character assassination.
He wasn’t the first person who was a national hero of great Britain, and then driven to suicide for the same reasons.
This is one story that always gets my blood boiling! Makes me want to restart the war just out of spite and need of Rache!
