Interestingly, the letter used as input was never the letter that would appear in the lampboard, which led to one of many ways to eliminate some of the multitude of letter possibilities and help crack Enigma’s code. This letter was recorded by a clerk for later transmission as part of an entire encoded message-a long series of letters and spaces. When a key was depressed by the operator, a single letter would illuminate on the machine’s lampboard. The machine did not send or receive communications it simply scrambled messages into blocks of seemingly undecipherable text.
GERMAN ENIGMA MACHINE CODE
And even if a code was broken by some stroke of luck, the settings for Enigma were changed every day. Without a codebook to reveal the proper plug and rotor settings, there were more than 107,000,000,000,000,000,000 possibilities. Additional complexity could be achieved through varying the order of the rotors, the initial settings of each rotor, and through 26 pairs of output-switching sockets located on the front face of the machine. As a letter was typed into the keyboard, one or more of the rotors moved, changing the electrical pathway through the machine.
Enigma could generate billions of letter combinations, each different from the last. Their confidence in the machine was well-founded. Most notably used by the Nazi military during WWII, German authorities considered the code system unbreakable and used Enigma to transmit some of their most secret messages. Germany’s Enigma is an electro-mechanical cipher machine that uses a series of rotating wheels and ever-changing electrical pathways to turn plain text into a scrambled message.
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