The first Enigma models were complex and expensive. Only when Enigma inventor Arthur Scherbius simplified the design of his machine it became practicable.

If you see an Enigma encryption machine in a museum or private collection, it usually looks like this:

Enigma-1

Enigmas usually have three or four rotors and they use a light panel to indicate letters but do not print them. However, before the Enigma became the machine we know today, its design underwent a number of significant changes.

 

The early days of the Enigma

The Enigma was invented by German Arthur Scherbius in 1918. As Dutch crypto history expert Karl de Leeuw found out, Scherbius took his idea from two Dutch naval officers, who had produced a rotor cipher machine as early as 1915. After several years of improvements, the first Enigma saw the light of day in 1923 (for more information check cryptomuseum.com). Scherbius’ early designs were encrypting typewriters (i.e., they printed the result of the encipherment or decipherment). The following model is named Enigma A:

Early-Enigma-03

The Enigma A featured four rotors with 28 electrical contact points each. It didn’t have a reflector.

The following design (Enigma B), was an encrypting typewriter, too. The typebars and the carriage were probably “borrowed” from a standard typewriter. The following picture is available in the UK National Archives (file HW 25/6), it was provided to me by Dermot Turing:

Early-Enigma-01b

The rotors of the Enigma B had 26 contact points each. There was no reflector. As it seems, Scherbius thought that four rotors were not enough, so he equipped the Enigma B with eight rotors.

The following design (Enigma H) has eight rotors, too (courtesy of the National Cryptologic Museum):

Early-Enigma-02

Simplifications made the Enigma successful

However, these early Enigma designs were clearly too complex. The printing mechanism and the high number of rotors proved very error-prone. In addition, these early Enigma’s were too expensive to be successful on the market.

Only when Scherbius and his staff decided to simply their machine it became practicable. As an important simplificaton, they cut down the number of rotors to three. In addition, they replaced the typewriting mechanism with a (much cheaper and more robust) light bulb panel.

The following Enigma model was launched in 1926. It is is also referred to as the “commercial Enigma”. It looks pretty much the same as the Enigmas later used by the German military. I features three rotors and a reflector:

Enigma-6

Scherbius tried to sell the commercial to enterprises, banks and state agencies, but he was not very successful. Only in the early 1930s, when the German military started using the Enigma on a large scale, it became a success. For Arthur Scherbius this came too late. He died in 1929.

 

Help required

The information provided in this blog post was taken from the cryptomuseum.com site operated by Marc Simons and Paul Reuvers. While there is plenty of information about the Enigma H and later models, still little is known about the models A and B. On their site, Marc and Paul write:

Help required
At present, no further information about the Enigma A / Enigma B is available. If you have any information that is not already on this [the cryptomuseum.com] page, please contact us. We would also like to know whether any Enigma B models have survived, so that they can be researched further.

If you have any additional information about these early Enigma models, please let me know.

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Further reading: A fascinating report of Enigma’s contemporary witness, Max Rüegger

Kommentare (2)

  1. #1 Manuel Rodriguez
    https://trollheaven.wordpress.com/
    10. Dezember 2016

    Auch wenn am Ende des Blogs suggeriert wird, dass die Geschichte der Kryptographie noch weitestgehend unerforscht wäre scheint mir alles bereits gesagt worden zu sein. Der Autor hat in seiner Bescheidenheit vergessen zu erwähnen, dass er ein Buch geschrieben hat was noch sehr viel ausführlicher auf die Frühgeschichte der Verschlüsselungsmachinen eingeht, https://www.w3l.de/w3lmedia/W3L/Medium025366/LeseprobeWeltDerGeheimenZeichenW3LBuch.pdf Dort wird sogar auf den wenig bekannten Erfinder Edward Hugh Hebern hingeweisen der 1912 eine Verschlüsselungsmachine entwickelt hat und natürlich auf die Holländer Theo A. van Hengel und R.P.C. Spengler welche direkten Anteil an der Enigma Model A hatten.

    Dennoch möchte ich noch eine kleine Anmerkung machen. Die Zeitepoche zwischen Ada Lovelace’s Tod 1852 und der Entwicklung der ersten Kryptomachinen kann man am leichtesten erschließen wenn man sich auf das Thema “Pferdewetten” fokussiert. George Julius hat ab 1900 an einer vote-counting-machine gearbeitet um die Wetteinsätze zu erfassen.

  2. #2 Uli
    13. Dezember 2016

    Nennt mich pingelig, aber die “commercial Enigma” auf dem Foto hat doch *vier* Rotoren und nicht drei, wie im Text geschrieben, oder?