The invention of the computer is a tricky thing to pinpoint. There were some early attempts that were not well known and some early attempts that were deliberately secret. [Alan Turing]’s efforts with Colossus were top secret for years, and while that work built on earlier efforts in Poland, [Turing] has as much claim to be the father of computers as anyone. But [Jack Copland] points out in a recent post that the famous computer scientist was also involved in another secret project: Delilah.
While [Turing] is best known for his work breaking ciphers at Bletchley Park, he also put time in on a second project about ten miles away in a secret electronics lab at Hanslope Park. There he worked with an assistant, [Donald Bayley] on Delilah — a portable system for encrypting voice transmissions.
The keyword is “portable.” In 1942, Bell Labs created SIGSALY for the U.S. Army to encrypt voice. It took up an entire room and weighed about 25 metric tons. [Turing] found a way to get the job done in a box that, including power, weighed in at 39 kilograms — not a cellphone, but portable in a truck. For comparison, an SCR-300 (the backpack radio used in the war, carried by “the lucky soldier”) weighed about 17 kilos with a full-sized battery.
The machine worked by generating a pseudo-random number sequence, synchronized with a similar unit on the other end of the transmission. Voice input was converted to digital, the numbers added on one end were transmitted, and the same numbers were subtracted from the other end. The result was not perfect for a number of reasons, but you could understand it, reportedly. But with the end of the war, interest in voice encryption wore off, and [Turing] and [Bayley] went on to other projects.
Luckily, [Bayley] saved his papers, which were auctioned off after his death for nearly half a million dollars. Without those papers, we wouldn’t know much about Delilah outside of a previously classified report (paywalled) and a few other notes.
The British National Museum of Computing rebuilt the device back in 2024, and you can see a video about it below. You can also see an interview in the video below with [Turing’s] nephew that mentions Delilah at the very end.
Title photo from The National Archives, London.
This articles is written by : Fady Askharoun Samy Askharoun
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