Tommy Flowers died on October 28, 1998. The following are three
obituary notices that have been posted to other lists.
------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 23:47:23 +0000
Subject: Tommy Flowers, Engineer who cracked German
communications, dead, at 92
From: [log in to unmask] (J. V. Field)
To: [log in to unmask]
Reply-to: [log in to unmask] (J. V. Field)
------- Forwarded message follows -------
LONDON (November 8, 1998 3:51 p.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com)
Tommy Flowers, who developed a pioneering computer that cracked
German military codes in World War II, is dead at 92.
Flowers died from heart failure at home in London on Oct. 28,
his son Kenneth said Sunday.
An engineering graduate of the University of London, Flowers
joined the British Post Office, then responsible for all national
communications, in the 1930s and experimented in electronic
telephone transmissions.
In World War II, he was sent to Bletchley Park, 50 miles from
London where mathematicians, cryptographers and other experts
worked on breaking German military codes.
Flowers secretly developed Colossus, a one-ton machine that
was able to unscramble coded messages electronically rather
than mechanically as had been done.
"Colossus had all the characteristics of the computer although
it wasn't thought of as a computer at the time," Kenneth Flowers
said in a telephone interview. "It could think and made decisions.
Up to then these machines had been used just to make numerical
calculations."
By the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, Flowers had produced another
Colossus that worked five times as fast as the original. By the end
of the war in 1945, 10 machines were in operation.
Thomas Harold Flowers, who was born in London on Dec. 22, 1905,
received an honor, Member of the British Empire, for his work in
the 1940s, but remained largely unknown to the wider public because
the work was kept secret until the '70s.
After the war, he returned to the post office and tried to persuade
his superiors to use technology to produce an all-electronic phone
system.
"He spent 20 years trying to persuade them, but he wasn't
so successful because he couldn't tell them he had already
produced the machine," Kenneth Flowers said.
He did not tell his own family of his achievement and the
many lives it saved until long after the war.
"He told us he worked on something secret and important," his
son said. "They were allowed to tell that much in case their
wives wondered where they were. But until the '70s he never
said anything else. It was a point of honor really."
Bletchley Park is now a tourist attraction with a replica
of the Colossus.
In addition to Kenneth, Flowers is survived by his wife,
Eileen, son John, and three grandchildren.
The funeral was to be held Monday at Hendon Crematorium in
north London.
==------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 08:35:26 -0500
Reply-to: "H-NET List on the History of Science, Medicine, and
Technology"
<[log in to unmask]>
From: "Harry M. Marks, H-SCI-MED-TECH" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: obit: Flowers: invented secret electronic-valve
computer for
Brits in WW2
To: [log in to unmask]
Richard Jensen <[log in to unmask]> writes:
Tommy Flowers, 92; Broke Nazi Codes
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
New York Times Sunday, November 8, 1998
Tommy Flowers, a British civil servant with a genius for
electronics whose pioneering Colossus computers enabled the Allies to
decode top-level German military communications in World War II, died
Oct. 28 at his home in London.
He was 92.
The Colossus machines were once described by Flowers as a
"string-and-sealing-wax affair." But they became the capstone of the
intelligence operation known as Ultra, which outwitted the Germans
and, in the words of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, "saved thousands of
British and American lives."
Soon after Britain went to war with Germany in the summer of 1939,
many of its leading mathematicians, cryptographers and technicians
were assembled at Bletchley Park, a Victorian-era estate 55 miles
north of London. It was there that the German military codes were
broken.
Flowers was named a Member of the British Empire, receiving a 1,000-
pound award for the decoding of military messages from the German
Enigma machines in the war's early years.
But his major contribution came in 1944 and 1945, when the
computers he designed tackled the codes produced by the more
sophisticated German Lorenz machines. The deciphering of those
messages, between Hitler's headquarters
and his generals, gave the British and Americans insight into German
defenses for the D-Day invasion and subsequent battles.
Thomas Harold Flowers was born on Dec. 22, 1905, in London, where
his father installed bakery machines. Early on, he showed a penchant
for engineering. As his son Kenneth related, "When he was age 5 he
was told he'd just gotten a baby sister. He said, 'I'd rather have a
No. 5 Meccano,"' a construction kit.
Flowers obtained a degree in engineering from the University of
London and in the late 1930s experimented with electronic telephone
transmissions for the research arm of the British Post Office, which
oversaw the nation's communications.
He was enlisted in the Bletchley Park effort in 1942, although he
later developed his computer at the Post Office's Dollis Hill
research station in London.
The British deduced the principals behind the Lorenz codes, but had
been frustrated in developing technology for quick decoding. The
machine the British were using in 1943 was slow and unreliable, and
sometimes caught fire.
Over a period of nine months, working with several senior
engineering aides and a few dozen technicians, Flowers developed the
first large electronic-valve computer, overcoming the skepticism of
Bletchley Park officials.
Colossus measured 16 feet by 7 feet, weighed one ton and was put
together partly with standard telephone-exchange parts, the "string
and sealing wax."
Although primitive by today's standards, it quickly pinpointed the
wheel settings used by the Germans' Lorenz machine operators for
coded messages, an essential first step in deciphering. Another
device then completed the decoding.
"As soon as they delivered the machine to Bletchley Park in
December 1943, it was a sensation," said Professor Brian Randell of
the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, an authority on the program.
"It was an incredibly revolutionary idea."
Decades later, Flowers wrote how "at the time I had no thought or
knowledge of computers in the modern sense and had never heard the
term used except to describe somebody who did calculations on a desk
machine."
Churchill's government wanted 10 Colossus devices delivered by
early June 1944, for the D-Day invasion. At least 10 machines were in
operation by the war's end, but only one more Colossus could be
produced in time for the Allied invasion of Normandy, on June 6. That
machine was, however, five times as fast as the first Colossus, which
started work the previous December.
After the war, British authorities dismantled most of the Colossus
machines. The very existence of Bletchley Park and the Colossus
computers remained secret until the 1970s.
Flowers returned to his electronics research for the Post Office and
remained there until 1964. He then worked for a division of
International Telephone and Telegraph, before retiring in 1969.
In addition to his son Kenneth, of Beverley, England, he is
survived by his wife, Eileen; another son, John, of London, and three
grandchildren.
Randell remembered how Flowers was "very quiet and modest" when
finally allowed by British authorities to reveal his accomplishments.
"He had to come to terms with the fact that he was now being
encouraged to talk about something that he'd been very actively
discouraged from almost thinking about for 30 years," Randell
observed.
Although recognized by the scientific community, Flowers remained
largely unknown to the British public. Yet his work lives on at
Bletchley Park, which is now a tourist attraction.
Run by a historic trust, it displays the Germans' Enigma and Lorenz
machines. But the centerpiece is a replica of the Colossus computer,
which was switched on by the Duke of Kent -- in the presence of
Flowers -- on June 6, 1996, the 52nd anniversary of the D-Day
invasion, which marked the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany.
------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 17:01:37 +0000
Reply-to: History of Computing Issues <[log in to unmask]>
From: Brian Randell <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Tommy Flowers, of Colossus fame
To: [log in to unmask]
It is with much regret that I pass on the news, just received in a
telephone call from his son Kenneth, that Tommy Flowers, chief
designer of the Colossus, the electronic computer built in 1943 at
the Post Office's Dollis Hill Research Station, for breaking German
teleprinter ciphers at Bletchley Park, died last Wednesday.
There was I understand an announcement in the Daily Telegraph last
Saturday, and there will be one on The Guardian tomorrow. The funeral
will be next Monday at 2pm at Hendon Crematorium - family flowers
only, donations to Cancer Relief.
Tommy Flowers was the most brilliant engineer and one of the nicest
people that I have ever known. I count it as a great privilege that I
was able to play a part, back in 1980, in helping to ensure that his
immense contribution to the work of Bletchley Park, and hence to the
whole conduct of World War II, at last started to receive public
recognition.
In the following years I met Tommy and his delightful wife on a
number of further occasions - one of the most moving being at the
official inauguration of the rebuilt Colossus at Bletchley Park on
June 6 1996, a very fitting day given the contribution that the
original machine made to the preparations for the Allied Landings in
Normandy on D-Day.
Brian Randell
Dept. of Computing Science, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon
Tyne,
NE1 7RU, UK
EMAIL = [log in to unmask] PHONE = +44 191 222 7923
FAX = +44 191 222 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/~brian.randell/
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|
