June 21, 2026
Codebreaker? More like chaos tinkerer
The Lost Story of Alan Turing's "Delilah" Project
Turing’s secret gadget notebooks are out, and commenters are obsessed with the ultimate wartime DIY king
TLDR: Newly revealed papers show Alan Turing spent part of World War II building a portable device to hide spoken conversations, adding "inventor" to his already legendary story. The comment mood is simple but strong: people are captivated by how hands-on and homemade his work looked.
Alan Turing is already famous as the codebreaking genius of World War II, but this new peek into his newly surfaced "Delilah" papers has people buzzing about a very different image: Turing as a hands-on, scribbling-in-notebooks, build-it-yourself inventor. The article reveals that from 1943 to 1945, Turing worked with engineer Donald Bayley on a portable system designed to scramble spoken conversations so enemies couldn’t listen in. In plain English: he wasn’t just cracking secret messages, he was also trying to invent a safer way for leaders to talk out loud during wartime.
And the tiny comment thread? Weirdly iconic. The standout reaction from asdefghyk is basically a mic-drop summary of the whole mood: people are fascinated by the "DIY approach." That phrase carries the entire vibe—less untouchable genius on a pedestal, more brilliant guy elbow-deep in notes, wires, and improvised problem-solving. It’s the kind of detail that makes the internet collectively go, wait, so he was a garage tinkerer too?
There isn’t a full-on comment war here yet, but the subtext is juicy: readers seem delighted by the idea that one of history’s most mythic minds was also, essentially, a relentless hobbyist with world-changing stakes. The humor writes itself—"Turing built war tech like the original weekend project guy" energy. The big feeling is awe, mixed with that classic online excitement when a legend suddenly becomes relatable.
Key Points
- •The article uses newly surfaced “Bayley papers” and notebooks to document Alan Turing’s secret Delilah voice-encryption project from 1943 to 1945.
- •Donald Bayley, Turing’s assistant on Delilah, preserved the papers until his death in 2020, enabling their later discovery and sale.
- •The archive was auctioned in London in November 2023 for nearly half a million U.S. dollars, after which the British government blocked its export.
- •Copeland says the papers reveal Turing’s transition from mathematical logic and number theory into circuits, electronics, and engineering mathematics.
- •The article places Delilah in the wartime shift from text-based cipher systems such as Enigma and Typex toward secure speech-encryption technologies like SIGSALY.