On 14 July 2015, Sotheby’s London will offer a rare and exceptionally well-preserved example of the World War II cipher machine, The Enigma. This small machine had a huge impact on the course of 20th-century history, playing a critical role in the extraordinary code-breaking story that unfolded at Bletchley Park (recently celebrated in the award winning film ‘The Imitation Game’) and the birth of the computer age. Used by Nazi forces during World War II to transmit coded messages – and with around 159 million million million possible settings – the German command was convinced that the Enigma machine produced an unbreakable code. The Enigma set a challenge that was famously answered by Alan Turing and the team at Bletchley Park, whose ground-breaking work is said to have shortened the war by two years and saved up to 22 million lives. Furthermore, by coming to the

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