As part of the Fine Books & Manuscripts sale on April 13, Bonhams sold a German Enigma machine for $269,000, a world record at auction. The 3-rotor Enigma I Enciphering Machine (aka Heeres Enigma) is in complete working condition and sold for almost 1.5 times its high estimate. The machine, with serial number 18660, was manufactured for the German military in Berlin in July of 1944. Few of these machines are known to have survived the war. Patented by Arthur Scherbius in 1918, the Enigma Machine uses three interchangeable rotors, which scramble plain-text messages to produce a cipher text message, a virtually unbreakable code. The Germans first used this machine as their primary cipher device in 1926 to encrypt naval coded messages. The code was finally cracked by a team of young British code breakers at Bletchley Park led
Read More: World record at Bonhams: The most valuable Enigma machine sells for $269,000