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The computers that won the war: Bletchley Park's codebreaking equipment is rebuilt

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Radio receivers for message interception

Source:  Robert Dowell, TNMOC

Radio receivers for message interception

In May 1942, a dedicated radio intercept station (Y Station) was established by the Foreign Office at Knockholt, near Sevenoaks, in Kent. The site was at an altitude of 600 feet with 160 acres of land which was requisitioned to accommodate new buildings and massive aerial arrays some of which had a span of 1000 feet. The majority of the radio receivers installed at Knockholt were the American RCA 88 - now on display and restored to full working order in the Tunny Gallery.

 

The Tunny Gallery, opened at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park on 26 May 2011, tells the incredible story of the interception and decryption of German High Command radio teleprinter messages during World War Two. The gallery shows the entire wartime code-breaking process from intercept to decrypt and recognises the remarkable achievements of the men and women who contributed to the process in the 1940s. The centrepiece of the gallery is a fully functioning rebuild of a Tunny machine that produced the final decrypts of enciphered communications of the German High Command. The original Tunny, a British re-engineering of the then-unseen German Lorenz S42 cipher machine, was completed in 1942.

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