The Turing bombes

Kahn writes that ‘In Britain, Cambridge students and graduates were the cream of the nation and [Bletchley] took the cream of the cream.’ Even among so many clever people, Turing was ‘viewed with considerable awe because of his evident intellect and the great originality of his contributions. … Many people found him incomprehensible, perhaps being intimidated by his reputation but more likely put off by his character and mannerisms. But all the Post Office engineers who worked with him … found him very easy to understand. … Their respect for him was immense,’ though they also voiced the caveat at the end of Mitchie's recollection:

Before the war, Turing had himself designed an electrically operated enciphering machine and built part of it with his own hands. (He also made a start at building an ingenious analogue device for calculating the zeros of the Riemann zeta function. Just as importantly, some of his pre-war work was on what were then some of the deeper parts of probability theory.) It is interesting to note that Shannon, whose reputation also rests on rather deep and abstract results, is another great gadgeteer whose collected papers include one on the building of a calculator to work in Roman numerals (rather than binary).