A Towering Day in London

 Hey all! Welcome back to another day of our London adventure. 

The plan for today began with a field trip to the Tower of London. Despite some mishaps and mayhem in the rush hour tube, we all eventually made it to the Tower and got the opportunity to explore it. There were a plethora of things to learn about and see at the Tower of London. Whether it was goggling over the Crown Jewels, learning about those who were imprisoned, tortured, and executed in the dungeons, wandering through the Armory in the White Tower, investigating the history of British coinage at the Royal Mint, or just watching the ravens - there was something for everyone to do and enjoy. 

Because it would have been difficult for all 20 of us to have navigated through the Tower together, we all split into groups to prioritize the parts we most wanted to see. The group I (Joseph) was with began by going through the Crown Jewels exhibit. It was truly incredible to see the size of the gems and how ornate everything was. We couldn't help marveling at the obvious wealth and craftmanship on display!

After examining the Crown Jewels we went on a tour of the Tower with a Beefeater (one of the King's royal bodyguards) who offered insights about the behind the scenes operations and history of the Tower. Our Beefeater had many funny anecdotes and jokes to share and had our tour group laughing for basically the whole time! It was a great experience and really helped to make the history of the Tower come alive!

Outer Picture of Tower of London

After that we explored the dungeons and torture rooms and learned about the torture methods used to extract information, as well as the thousands of prisoners who were held in the Tower over the course of its use as a prison. Much of the graffiti carved by prisoners was really intricate and showed just how much time they must have had on their hands. To finish it off, though, was the White Tower which is probably the most iconic part of the Tower of London complex. It is the tower built by William the Conqueror as his royal residence and was the home of the British monarchs for over 500 years following William building it.

The White Tower

Inside the White Tower was a history of the arsenal, arms, and armaments of the monarchy throughout Britain's history as well as an explanation of how it was originally designed by William the Conqueror. It was full of weapons, armor, and other insignia and regalia that have been used by the royal guard and English army throughout Britain's long history of war. It was really incredible to see how the armaments progressed throughout history!

Suit of Armor

This afternoon we had another class, much to the exhaustion of everyone involved. Nevertheless, we took on a new challenge in attempting to decode the infamous Enigma machine aided by our own paper Enigmas (or Papernigmas, if you will). The process to break the machine’s code was four-fold: first we had to find the permutation cycle structure of the code in order to find the day key. This process involved looking at the first six letters (which were the message keys customized by the operators for each message) and looking for patterns between the first and fourth, second and fifth, and third and sixth letters respectively. This worked because the message keys were 3 letter keys that were repeated twice. Then, by consulting a catalogue of such cycle lengths, we found the day key and the rotor settings which allowed us to determine how we should set the rotors within the Enigma machine to begin the process of decrypting. From there we had to determine the settings of the plugboard by taking the composition of the first cycle structure (1) and the fourth (2) and looking at the differences in the order and pattern of letters between them. This revealed the switched letters through the differences in the patterns. Finally, with this, we were able to find the settings for both the rotors and plugboard that were needed to solve the message. All that was left at this point was to use the normal Enigma process to trace the paths of each letter (ka-chunking between each one) and reveal the message we had been given: Attack at dawn.

After a two hour break from codebreaking, we reconvened at the hotel where we are staying for a group pizza dinner and a showing of the Imitation Game. The Imitation Game was an interesting recounting of the events at Bletchley Park and the way that Alan Turing and other English codebreakers cracked the Enigma, but it wasn't very historically accurate. It was interesting to watch the Hollywoodization of the story but also really sad that the Polish code breakers were not recognized for their work on cracking the code. While I enjoyed it as a movie, it lost a lot of its sparkle after knowing the history.

Overall, it was a really good day of breaking codes and learning history.

Signing off,

Joseph Tarrant and Lorelei Zagol