Researchers had a rare opportunity to peek "under the hood" of the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries' two Enigma machines, opening the World War II-era machines to photograph their carefully-crafted interiors and to locate and record the serial numbers printed on their rotors.
The University Libraries acquired the two encryption devices — one 4-rotor machine and one 3-rotor machine — in February 2018 as part of a collection of over 50 calculating machines, letters and books gifted to the university by author Pamela McCorduck, wife of the late Computer Science Department Head Joseph Traub. With this gift, CMU became one of a handful of American institutions to own an Enigma machine.
Enigma machines, electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines used to encrypt communication, were most notably were used by Nazi Germany to protect military communication during World War II.
During a four-hour period on October 7, campus historians and researchers associated with History of Science and Technology at CMU (HOST @ CMU) — a cross-campus, interdisciplinary initiative to collect and preserve CMU's historical contributions to scientific and technical development — assembled in the Hunt Library Fine and Rare Book Room to open up the machines.
Andrew Meade McGee, visiting assistant professor of history and the University Libraries' CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Science and Computing, described the procedure as a hands-on history exercise.
"Today, historians and engineers with screwdrivers are attempting to recapture the inner workings of a past technology and trace the intellectual connections between this electromechanical piece of the past and today's information technology ecosystem," McGee said.