Zygalski sheets: Polish codebreaking and the role of reconstruction in the Top Secret exhibition at the Science Museum

Bruton, Elizabeth; McCarthy, Jeremy; Turing, Dermot

Zygalski sheets: Polish codebreaking and the role of reconstruction in the Top Secret exhibition at the Science Museum

Download

Name

2023-11-16_ZygalskiSheetsEBruton_FINAL.pdf

Description

visibility:open

Size

1.03 MB

Format

Adobe PDF

Checksum (CRC64NVME)

OES/ucB8ibY=

Resource type

Journal article

Creator (person)

Bruton, Elizabeth

McCarthy, Jeremy

Turing, Dermot

Date published

March 30, 2022

Abstract

The Top Secret: From ciphers to cyber security exhibition at various Science Museum Group sites from 2019 to 2022 explored the remarkable, little-known world of codebreaking, ciphers and secret communications from the trenches of the First World War to cyber security today. At the heart of the exhibition was the personal and technological story of codebreaking at Bletchley Park, the British centre for codebreaking and cryptanalysis during the Second World War, as well an acknowledgement of the vital pre-war contribution of the Polish Cipher Bureau. Zygalski sheets, developed by Polish codebreaker and mathematician Henryk Zygalski in 1938, were a manual grid-based cardboard system used by the Polish Cipher Bureau and Bletchley Park to aid the decryption of German Enigma machine cipher messages. Lacking original artefacts and visual historical representation thereof, the Top Secret curator Dr Elizabeth Bruton turned to external experts on the Polish cipher bureau and codebreaking in the Second World War, Dr Dermot Turing (writer) and Jeremy McCarthy (volunteer at The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC)). The ensuing email conversation explored how the design and use of the Zygalski sheets could be reconstructed from the existing and sometimes contradictory evidence and sources. This conversation offers a rare insight into the research process and expert peer review behind an exhibition object and label. Secondly, we offer a reflection on museum practice, exploring how the resulting reconstruction was interpreted and displayed within the Top Secret exhibition alongside authentic historic artefacts from the Science Museum Group’s and GCHQ’s historic collections.