Early 1940: British police listening for radio transmissions from German spies within the UK pick up weird signals, and pass them to
Bletchley Park, the United Kingdom's main decryption establishment in WWII. The source of these German messages is an unknown machine, which the Brits dub
Tunny (10 minute video with
Tony Sale describing the Tunny). August 30, 1941: German operators send two very similar messages with the same key, providing insight into the encryption scheme. By January 1942, British cryptographers deduced the workings of the German code machines, sight unseen. The British were able to create their own Tunny emulators to decrypt messages sent by German High Command. After the war, these and other British code-breaking and emulating machines were demolished and/or recycled for parts and their blueprints destroyed, leaving a hole in the history of the British WWII code breaking. Efforts to rebuild the British Tunny emulator started in the 1990s, and quite recently
a Tunny emulator replica was completed.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on May 30, 2011 -
12 comments
Though the
B-2 Spirit is perhaps the best-known of the
flying wing designs, its creation came almost 50 years after the earliest attempts at creating fixed-wing aircraft with no definite fuselage. The first prototypes of Frenchman
Charles Fauvel's flying wings followed the patent on his formula for the flying wing in 1929. Jack Northrop's newly formed Northrop Aircraft Co. created the first flying wing for the United States in 1940, dubbed
Northrom N-1M "Jeep". But it was the
Horten Brothers, German aircraft pilots and enthusiasts, who created the first fully-functional stealth flying wing: the
Horten Ho IX.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jun 24, 2009 -
32 comments
