Chapter 173: Enigma
Things were progressing much as Bruno had predicted on the global stage. The year was currently 1911, and soon enough the advanced Type XXI U-Boats Bruno had prepared years in advance would begin production, hopefully replacing the current U-Boat Types, which were woefully obsolete when compared to the variant he had introduced to the world decades in advance.
And while his armored vehicles, planes, and warships were all either already in production, or were getting close to it, there was one other invention Bruno had not introduced until now. It was, frankly speaking, an oversight on his part not to do so earlier, but at the same time, he still had enough time left before the war began that it didn't matter all that much. Currently, Bruno was at home, with a beer stein in one hand and a sandwich in the other, looking over the details of the rough draft he had just concluded. It was a rather small device, at least compared to the weapons he had already designed.
But it was perhaps the most critical piece of technology to ensure the success of the German Reich in the Great War that was to come.
Granted, Bruno did not know all the ins and outs of the initial design, nor was he fully versed in the study of cryptography, but he had plenty of men in his employ who could make his vision a reality. The mechanical engineering aspects of the legendary cipher known as the "Enigma Machine" were well within his field of expertise to at least get a proof of concept going.
The Enigma Machine was, as previously stated, a cipher, and quite the advanced one at that. It was said in more common circles to have been damn near uncrackable and would have never been solved if not for several blunders of the Third Reich, some of which were entirely political and bureaucratic in nature.
While the Polish, with the aid of the French Intelligence Services, managed to create a device capable of cracking the Enigma Code as early as 1933, updates to the platform, such as adding a fourth rotor, made such efforts obsolete.
It was not until 1942, when a British mathematician and logician named Alan Turing managed to overcome these problems, and only after the Allies had managed to capture German cipher keys.
Frankly speaking, however, such knowledge was well beyond the Entente's capabilities during the Great War, and Bruno expected a proper Enigma Machine developed in accordance with the standards of its last generation from his previous life would be more than enough to make it impossible to intercept and decode German communications.
The Enigma Machine itself was a rather simple instrument, making use of a combination of mechanical and electrical subsystems.
The mechanical subsystem consisted of a keyboard and a set of rotating disks that were arranged adjacently along a spindle. The spindle was one of various components to turn at least one rotor with each key press.