A secret that took thousands of people
When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, the codebreaking station at Bletchley Park had about 200 staff. By late 1944 it had nearly 9,000, working in shifts around the clock, and roughly three-quarters of them were women. Many of the household names attached to the place, such as Alan Turing, are real and deserved. But the station worked because of an unglamorous chain of people: interceptors, clerks, machine operators, linguists, engineers and mathematicians. Its work stayed under the Official Secrets Act for decades, and the wider public learned of it only in the 1970s, which is one reason the many were forgotten while a few became famous.
Three handoffs that mattered
The story of breaking Enigma does not begin in England. In Warsaw, the Polish Cipher Bureau’s mathematicians Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki began attacking the machine in 1932. By the end of that year Rejewski had worked out the wiring of the military rotors, helped by documents supplied by French intelligence, and with engineers the Bureau built electromechanical devices called bomby. In July 1939, weeks before the war, the Poles met British and French codebreakers near Warsaw and shared their methods and replica machines. British cryptanalysts, including Turing and Gordon Welchman, then developed their own, much more capable machine, the Bombe.
A second handoff came later, with the German teleprinter cipher known as Lorenz. Mathematicians, including W. T. Tutte, worked out how it functioned, and Max Newman led the effort to mechanise the attack. The engineer Tommy Flowers at the Post Office Research Station proposed an electronic machine with well over a thousand valves, at a time when senior colleagues doubted that so many valves could run reliably. His team built the first Colossus, which reached Bletchley in January 1944, and ten had been completed by the war’s end. Most were dismantled afterwards, and Flowers received little recognition until the 1970s.
- Prior art abroad (1932-1939). Polish mathematicians recover Enigma’s wiring and design the first dedicated machines.
- Transfer (July 1939). Methods and replica machines are shared with British and French colleagues.
- Industrial scaling (1939-45). Engineers and machine operators turn mathematical ideas into working Bombes.
- New problem, new machine (1943-44). Lorenz analysis and Flowers’s electronic engineering lead to Colossus.
- Secrecy (1945-1970s). Machines are dismantled, records stay classified, and credit is slow to catch up.
A harder case: the double helix
Credit for the structure of DNA shows how contested “teamwork” can be. In April 1953, Nature published three linked papers: Watson and Crick’s proposed double-helix model, one from Maurice Wilkins and colleagues, and one from Rosalind Franklin and her student Raymond Gosling. Franklin, a scientist at King’s College London, had produced some of the sharpest X-ray diffraction evidence for DNA’s helical form. The best-known image, Photo 51, was taken in May 1952 by Gosling, her doctoral student, in her group.
What happened next is where historians disagree about emphasis. In early 1953 Wilkins showed Photo 51 to James Watson without Franklin’s permission, and Max Perutz had separately passed Francis Crick a Medical Research Council report that contained her measurements. Watson and Crick’s paper thanked Franklin and Wilkins only in a footnote. Franklin died in 1958, aged 37. In 1962 the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Crick, Watson and Wilkins, and the Nobel rules do not allow posthumous awards.
Some accounts, beginning with Watson’s memoir The Double Helix, portrayed Franklin dismissively, and later defenders such as Aaron Klug and Anne Sayre pushed back. More recent scholarship, including a 2023 study by Matthew Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort, argues that she was a full participant in a joint effort and that the “stolen data” story is too simple, since the two teams appear to have shared information willingly. We are summarising that debate, not settling it. A fair reading is that her measurements were central, that she was treated unequally, and that how much it “should” have changed the credit is a judgment, not a fact the archives can decide.
Why “lone genius” stories persist
Stories with one hero are easier to tell, teach and award. They also tend to leave out support staff. At Bletchley, most of the workforce was women, and many of them left few traces in official histories. This is not an argument that individuals do not matter. Turing’s ideas were distinctive, Franklin’s experimental work was central, and Flowers had to argue against doubters. The more accurate picture is a mix: a few people see an idea early, and many others make it real.
If you want to see how this plays out in other domains, our articles on what failure contributes to invention and how humans learn to do what once seemed impossible show how training, tools and colleagues shape individual achievement.
