Bombe maker remembered in stone

AS A STATUE OF the founder of computer science and arguably Britain's greatest ever inventor is unveiled at Bletchley Park in the UK tomorrow, Britons display an low appreciation of Alan Turing's legacy.

A quick, not very unscientific, email survey among IT industry bods showed nearly half had never heard of him. “No idea. who is he?” replied one hack from a leading IT newspaper. “I must admit I didn't know who Turing was,” confessed another, “but I do now because I just googled him.”

Tomorrow (Tuesday) the Bletchley Park Trust will unveil a specially commissioned statue of Turing sculptor Stephen Kettle. The statue was commissioned by the late Mr Sidney Frank, an American billionaire and philanthropist.

The life-size one and a half ton statue is made from half a million pieces of five hundred million year old Welsh slate. Stone which would have been in Nazi control, if Turing had not had the mathematical genius to crack the German Naval Enigma messages during world war two.

Later, his Bombe machine was to provide a body of work that provided the foundations on which the modern computer age was created.

Of the people who have heard of him, few know the proper context of his death. “The only Alan Turing I know of is the mathematician, logician, and cryptographer who died in 1954 from eating an apple,” said one surveyee.

The origin of the Apple symbol is meant to be a tribute to Turing.

Some argue the apple that killed Turing was actually laced with Cyanide. And that Turing was murdered because he was gay.

Turing's tragic early death robbed us of one of Britain's greatest inventors, they argue. There is certainly more to his tale than s generally known.

“A large part of Turing's story was that he was gay. It's what made him who was. But that's been airbrushed out of history,” said Stewart Who, editor of webzine Gay.com.

What happened to Turing was tantamount to state torture, says Who. Turing was told he faced prison if he didn't have hormone treatment, because the authorities felt that being gay meant he was a liability, according to Who.

“It's a bit like talking about Martin Luther King, but not mentioning that he's black,” Who said. µ