Explanation: Alan Turing was a mathematician and computer scientist whose revolutionary work during WW2 helped the British shorten the war considerably by breaking (and thus having access to) Nazi coded messages.
A little over half a decade after the war, a chance break-in at his house led to him accidentally incriminating himself - by admitting to the presence of his boyfriend. This being the 1950s UK, the courts gave him a choice for the horrific crime of homosexuality - chemical castration, or several months in prison. Turing considered that he would not last in prison, and opted for the chemical treatment. Some time later, he bit into an apple laced with cyanide and died, which many consider to be an act of suicide (though it is still disputed, some believe it was genuinely an accident).
Wait a second, Alan Turing was a queer icon? I had no idea.
I cannot fathom how anyone can allow people to be punished for loving who they love, in a consenting relationship between two adults. What a terrible and tragic story. Fuck anyone who wants to punish people for doing something that doesn’t hurt anyone; for doing something that in fact is literally the direct opposite of hurting anyone. Like, fuck them to the core, and not in any nice way.
Wait a second, Alan Turing was a queer icon?
Yeah. He’s a queer icon, and a god among humans to computer science fans.
It breaks my heart that he didn’t get to see the current era of queer federated computing. If there’s any kind of after-life, Alan has got to be rooting for the Fediverse.
I wouldn’t say that he’s a well-known queer icon, but well-known enough that there’s been an enduring myth that the early Apple icon was a reference to him - the apple with a bite taken out of it and colored like a rainbow. However, the designers have said that they had no idea at the time and it was purely coincidence.
I’m not sure about that (the icon bit). I’ve gay friends who have been surprised that Turing was gay - personally I knew about it since I knew about Turing, but I was a nerd who was interested in the theory of computation. It’s only relative recently (with the popularity of unbelievably lousy character-assassination like “the Imitation Game”*) that he’s been more in the general public eye, I think.
- This is a shit film that represents the worse of pandering, and casts Turing in an appallingly poor light, whilst leaning into the “autistic savant” trope hard. It’s abysmal.
Apple laced with cyanide is an accident ??
Damm what a wild times. I would though, with my quite non-normal, reasoning capabilities it would have been done intentionally to murder someone…
Poor storage of laboratory chemicals is the alternative explanation. While plausible, suicide seems more likely to my eyes.
The story is at least semi-plausible, but Turing also still had friends in the right places (not enough to dig him out of the hole he got himself into with the local plod*) and there was a strong social taboo around suicide.
(* At the time there was good reason to believe that the end of the outlawing of homosexuality was just around the corner, so offering a genuine explanation was not necessarily Turing acting as such a naif as is often portrayed.)
Since Snow White, we all know this wasn’t an accident.
Some have speculated that it’s the origin of the Apple logo but Jobs confirmed it wasn’t.
“Almost singlehandedly” is way off the mark. Welchman, Tutte - the place was filled with eccentric geniuses; it was the success of management as much as the individual that Bletchley saw so much success.
(“The story of Hut 6” is a good read on the subject. What comes across was that success was down to serendipity as well as hard work, and some remarkably enlightened leadership.)
It’s worth mentioning that German cryptologists had some considerable success cracking British codes as well, notably including the cyphers the Admiralty used to communicate with merchant ships in convoys during the first half of the war. This was a major factor behind Britain nearly losing the Battle of the Atlantic before they even had a chance to participate in the re-invasion of continental Europe in 1944.
Not to disregard Turing here as I believe he is still one of the greats of computing, but the idea that he “Almost Singlehandedly” did anything is to the discredit of the thousands of workers at Bletchley Park alongside him, and the Polish cryptographers who initially cracked several versions of Enigma in the 1930s and went on to teach the Bletchley how they did it.
Not to mention, the soldiers
Turing aside, the world simply treated gay people horribly altogether.
Gay men were victims of the holocaust much like many other groups but Germany wouldn’t recognize this until 4 decades later in the 1980s. We know what the British did to Turing but the U.S. acted similarly due to the Lavender Scare which compared gay people to communists and enacted its own witch hunts for them.
I remember reading somewhere that upon liberation from concentration camps, many gay individuals were simply transferred to prisons from their home country for the crime of being gay. The Nazis were terrifyingly effective in branding exactly what kind of “undesirable” you were:
Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badge
im sorry asocial? What the fuck does this mean in the context of the nazis? Were people who didn’t actively socialize considered a threat somehow?
Asocial was a very broad term - anyone they thought was not sufficiently contributing to society, essentially.
ok so basically “slackers” were considered to be asocial and then stuffed into the gulags, fascinating.
yes, Remember Nazi rhetoric didn’t hate the Polish, the Jewish, the Communist etc… without having an easily agreed upon base of reasons as to why you should hate them. why do you think people have called Republican rhetoric genocidal? because they are further along to the “justifying the camps” than many people realize, they know the Nazis did bad things, but very few people know what led up to and allowed the Nazis to do those bad things.
yeah, current republican sentiment is problematic. It’s an interesting and really hard problem to deal with, for multiple reasons. Because on one hand it’s a frogs in a boiling pot problem, but on the other it’s also really hard to do anything about because they just reverse anything you throw at them, and pretend you’re the one being the nazi, not them.
but on the other it’s also really hard to do anything about because they just reverse anything you throw at them, and pretend you’re the one being the nazi, not them.
Also an old Nazi tactic.
“Mean old Weimar Republic, muzzling our holsum leader, don’t they believe in freeze peach???”
And the Weimar Republic gave in, like the spineless fucks they were.
That’s why I always feel a little sad whenever he comes up in conversation. He could’ve done more cool shit.
The whole of the UK could have been a tech powerhouse if they didn’t screw over Turing and send the women of Bletchley Park back into the kitchen.
Can we stop the false notion that he did it on his own? It’s just not true. Not even close.
Arne Beurling however DID single-handedly Crack a T52 in 2 weeks with nothing but pen and paper.
He was undeniably brilliant, and was instrumental in both the development of the Bombe (which broke the Enigma code), and the programming of Colossus (which broke… the other code the Germans used of which I can’t remember the name). Plus he was instrumental in the first steps of both computer science in general and artifical intelligence in particular. He deserves the plaudits.
But so do a lot of other people who worked at Bletchly park (if you get the chance, go there, it’s great) and elsewhere.
He sure was brilliant. And what was done to him is from today’s standpoint barbaric, but the notion that he alone was responsible for breaking the codes is a terrible falsehood that needs to die.
I think we can celebrate his brilliancy without discrediting everyone else that worked on the project. There’s just no need to add lies such as “single handedly”.
He was singularly brilliant in coming up with the Turing Machine and contributing towards the Church Turing Thesis which are the foundations of all computer science. It is true that he did not crack enigma by himself but his scientific contributions shouldn’t be understated.
without alan turing the modern era would not be the way it is. In the same way that without tesla the modern electrical grid simply would not be the same as it is today.
These people didn’t do it alone, nobody does it alone, but without these people things would be substantially different. It’s a steve jobs type influence.
I was with you till you said Steve Jobs. Jobs was only good at abusing his employees and marketing.
regardless, apple did still completely redefine the entire mobile phone space.
Conservatives would still do this, if it would still be legal… just saying.
Edit: Stroke avoided ;-)
Could you hold put your arms for 30 seconds please? Just need to check for a stroke.
Damn you are right… what the heck?
“And Türing answered another,” Rudy said.
“Who’s that?”
“It’s me,” Alan said. “But Rudy’s joking. ‘Turing’ doesn’t really have an umlaut in it.”
“He’s going to have an umlaut in him later tonight,” Rudy said, looking at Alan in a way that, in retrospect, years later, Lawrence would understand to have been smoldering.”
I couldn’t even believe Neal Stephenson wrote that.
And yeah, Alan Turing was awesome and he was treated horribly.
The Cryptonomicon is such a good book. I’m pretty sure I’ve read it 30 times now.
what does this mean
He gon get sum dick
He wasn’t the first person who was a national hero of great Britain, and then driven to suicide for the same reasons.
I just recently watched The Imitation Game for the first time. I dunno how accurate it is, but it was an amazing performance by Cumberbatch.
Historically speaking it’s a lazy character assassination.
Elaborate please
By the character assassination he probably means he’s depicted as an asocial eccentric genious, while by all accounts he was a fairly normal charming person.
And regarding his accomplishments, the movie is also completely wrong. His Enigma decoding work was of course very valuable, but as others mentioned here heavily based on earlier polish efforts, and teamwork, not just him. It’s also portrayed as an early computer, and is then said that he was at the basis of modern computers. This is bullshit, that device was in no way close to modern computers, and he was at the forefront of theoretical computer science. Look up the turing machine which is a theoretical device that can compute anything an actual computer can compute, but has very simple properties making scientific/mathematical analysis of what computation is, what is computable, … possible. Which is an incredible achievement, would be nice if they mentioned that in the movie…
(and also the entire story is just fantasy around the work that happened for enigma. His nemesis in the movie that was against building the machine also never existed etc…)
The only thing truthful about the movie is “There was a gay computer scientist named Alan Turing that played an important role in decoding the enigma encoded messages during the second world war”, and all the rest is just invented drama that’s not in any way based on reality. He wasn’t some autistic genius, there was no nemesis, he didn’t invent computers, nor was the enigma decoding device related to computers, etc…
You’re not the person I asked, but thanks for that awesome write up.
The lazy autosm-washing aside: Turing went to his grave never speaking about his accomplishments - still under the OSA at the time. He was neither involved with the decision to use or not, things that were discovered via cracking enigma. The acts that film lays at hia door in the sake of some lazy drama repreaent a vilification of his character.
Thank you for spelling all that out. I knew Hollywood would take dramatic liberties but they basically wrote a completely fictitious drama and dropped a historical figure into it.
It completely misses the mark on what he actually accomplished.
Didn’t they remove Alan’s gayness out of it?
The whole movie is about how gay he is
Oh, wow Glad to hear that actually. I had heard wrong things I guess
No, it’s a dominant theme throughout.
At least the queen forgave him for it eighty years later or something.
There was nothing to forgive. And it was too late for her to beg his forgiveness.
I feel you’ve missed the ironic tone of my previous comment, because that’s precisely what I was referring to!
Upon second reading, it appears that I did. Apologies.
Happens!
He was pardoned 9 years ago…an entire lifetime after his death…
You know… what they call “the good ol’ days” they wax nostalgic about.
It wasn’t just the British system it was just the culture at the time for everywhere. The United States was far further behind the times at that point in time Britain.
Segregation was still a thing in the 1940s to the point at which American soldiers coming to the UK had to have lessons in how not to be racist. Gay rights weren’t even on anyone’s radar back then.
It wasn’t just the British system it was just the culture at the time for everywhere.
France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway…
I don’t mean to say that Britain was some barbaric backwater with this. You are certainly right that this treatment was common in other states, even if not universal. But it was very much a case of Britain doing something that was no longer regarded as essential to the behavior of a civilized state to one of their most brilliant minds, a man who was a hero who saved thousands of British lives at minimum by his efforts. It’s a reminder of how brutish we can be by adhering to established norms without consideration of their reasoning.
The United States was far further behind the times at that point in time Britain.
Speaking as an American, I might suggest that using the social norms of the US of the first half of the 20th century as a yardstick might be setting the bar a bit low.
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it was forced “chemical castration” or something right? I don’t recall any medical procedures being performed on him, but yeah it’s still fucking horrid.
Classic british experience really.
How is chemical castration not a medical procedure?
They probably meant surgical procedure.
generally in my mind, a “medical procedure” would be something like a surgery. Chemical castration, unless injected would essentially just be a prescribed drug, or in the case of an injection, an injection. That’s relatively minor compared to a literal surgical castration in my mind.
George Carlin on religious people on abortion and homosexuals:
