PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY

Close Notification

Your cart does not contain any items

Geniuses at War

Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age

David A. Price

$46.99

Hardback

In stock
Ready to ship

QTY:

English
Alfred A. Knopf
14 September 2021
"The dramatic, untold story of the brilliant team whose feats of innovation and engineering created the world's first digital electronic computer-decrypting the Nazis' toughest code, helping bring an end to WWII, and ushering in the information age.

Planning the invasion of Normandy, the Allies knew that decoding the communications of the Nazi high command was imperative for its success. But standing in their way was an encryption machine they called Tunny (British English for ""tuna""), which was vastly more difficult to crack than the infamous Enigma cipher.

To surmount this seemingly impossible challenge, Alan Turing, the Enigma codebreaker, brought in a maverick English working-class engineer named Tommy Flowers who devised the ingenious, daring, and controversial plan to build a machine that would calculate at breathtaking speed and break the code in nearly real time. Together with the pioneering mathematician Max Newman, Flowers and his team produced-against the odds, the clock, and a resistant leadership-Colossus, the world's first digital electronic computer, the machine that would help bring the war to an end.

Drawing upon recently declassified sources, David A. Price's Geniuses at War tells, for the first time, the full mesmerizing story of the great minds behind Colossus and chronicles the remarkable feats of engineering genius that marked the dawn of the digital age."

By:  
Imprint:   Alfred A. Knopf
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 210mm,  Width: 143mm, 
Weight:   567g
ISBN:   9780525521549
ISBN 10:   0525521542
Pages:   240
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

DAVID A. PRICE was educated at the College of William and Mary, Harvard University, and the University of Cambridge. He is the author of The Pixar Touch and Love and Hate in Jamestown. Price lives with his wife in Richmond, Virginia.

Reviews for Geniuses at War: Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age

David Price has produced the riveting story of how a team of colorful geniuses in Bletchley Park, England broke the most secure German World War II codes. The tale of Alan Turing and the Enigma machine is well known, but Price describes the very secret code-breaking project that Turing and his colleagues tackled later in the war, which involved building the world's first electronic computer. Thus was the digital age born. --Walter Isaacson, author of The Innovators World War II opened two legendary gateways to the modern age: Los Alamos and Bletchley Park. A declassified report on the construction of the atomic bomb was released just six days after Hiroshima, while the Official Secrets Act lingered for thirty years over the codebreaking at Bletchley Park. David Price has distilled the available knowledge into an authoritative yet fast-paced account, lending the characters behind Colossus a voice that was silenced for far too long. --George Dyson, author of Turing's Cathedral


See Inside

See Also