You know those stories where someone stumbles upon a Picasso or Georgia O’Keefe or something big at Goodwill? This is kind of like that.
Notes written by Alan Turing and his team were found stuffed into the walls of Hut 6, where they worked to break Nazi codes during World War II. The notes have spent the last 70 years as insulation in the Bletchley Park hut and were officially discovered during a renovation in 2013. They will be displayed in the site’s museum in an exhibition “The Restoration of Historic Bletchley Park,” according to this report by MK Web.
“The documents also included the only known examples of Banbury sheets, a technique devised by the mathematician Alan Turing to accelerate the process of decrypting Nazi messages. No other examples have ever been found,” the site reports.
I’d love to know the backstory of how this happened: “Hey, Turing, it’s freaking freezing in here.” “Here, take these…stuff them into the walls. I’m a crazy-smart genius, and I’m done with them anyway. Also I’m really busy and quite bothering me with tripe like this.”
Among the documents, other items were found including a fragment of a teapot, glass bottles and a “time capsule.” You can follow the updates on the park’s renovation here.
In case you were hankering to unload about a million dollars, Turing’s private notebook, which he kept while working at Bletchley, will be up for auction in New York this April 13 at Bonhams’ Fine Books and Manuscripts. It is expected to fetch more than $850,000.
Now go watch The Imitation Game again.
