Historian Reacts - ALAN TURING by Yarnhub

welcome back everyone to another reaction video well we're going to revisit our friends at yarnhub and i say friends because yarnhub are subscribers of this channel so there's a mutual admiration society going on there i am huge fans of their work and want to give them all the support i can so when this video is done please go check out their channel they do a lot of great animated uh histories uh being able to show you things and giving you a visual representation of them we've done several of their videos i'll put links in the description to the other yarn hub videos that i have reacted to a couple of things coming up this week original content one will be episode two of the gettysburg series be watching for that probably thursday though it will be available to our patrons and members here on youtube as early as late tonight or early tomorrow sometime you'll get to see that a couple of days early the other thing is on wednesday the first anniversary of my very first reaction video i'll be giving you my top 10 favorite reactions that i have done in the last year i'm excited to share that with you as well getting work on that done right now but we're gonna dive into the story of alan turing today if you're familiar at all uh with this channel you know i love to talk about some of my favorite historical movies and the imitation game is one of those now there's a lot of stuff that isn't necessarily historically correct in that movie but i think it was a great movie it got a lot of important things right even if it didn't get it all right and i think alan touring's a very compelling story and we'll talk a little bit more about that as we go along uh but i wanted to take a look at their six-minute long video about alan turing so we could honor this man uh who has contributed so much not only to our victory in world war ii as the allies but to the world that we have today and a man who really did not get treated well for his efforts so we'll talk a little bit about that as we go along let's dive in [Music] the most famous of the group that broke the german enigma machine codes was alan turing he was one of those people who seemed to be one step ahead of the rest of us in the fields of math and science he and the team at bletchley park a top secret center dedicated to code breaking during the war helped turn the tide of the conflict by decrypting the nazi's most difficult codes during was born in 1912. so um and one of the things and i don't know how much they'll get into this that i think is really important to point out about the breaking of the enigma code uh is that it was not something that was all done by bletchley park uh there was a polish uh cryptography group that as early as the early 1930s was working on breaking the german enigma code and you know developing their own version of the enigma machine and so they did a ton of really important work on enigma even before world war ii even broke out so it's important to give them credit for that um you know it's it's kind of cool you know you guys hear me talk up poll uh the polls all the time poland um a country that didn't even exist again until the aftermath of world war one even though they had a long history before that um but boy it just seems like they turn up time and time again uh it was the polish uh people who made up a large part of breaking the siege of vienna in 1683 uh it's the polls who are right in the middle of helping break the enigma code it's the poles who have the number one uh squadron during the battle of britain uh and you know they just the heroism and the resilience of the polish people is just something to be admired uh and it's absolutely fantastic to be able to brag about you guys every chance i get the second of two brothers as a young man turing was incredibly intelligent and athletically gifted he rode his bike everywhere he rode 60 miles to his boarding school on his first day stuck far away by a train strike he made it on time the school didn't always recognize turing's talents he was almost stopped from taking the school certificate due to concerns that he would fail while he excelled in science his headmaster said if he is to be solely a scientific specialist he is wasting his time at public school in 1928 turing met a new classmate called christopher malcolm the two young men became very close friends and they do show a little bit of the story of the relationship with alan i don't know if it's a relationship they're friends but alan turing and christopher they show flashbacks and they show a little bit of that story they would also explore intellectual problems in physics and math together they would be seen passing notes to each other during class the two boys were very close and at this time allen supposedly developed a crush on christopher their friendship was not to last though as in 1930 when allen was 17 years old christopher died of tuberculosis and in the movie they show alan as being a little bit younger than that or at least it seems but you know you can imagine um you know 17 years old if he indeed did have a crush on this guy alan turing was homosexual if he had a crush on on christopher um him dying what that would have done to him um you know especially if he and i don't know if he was if he was someone who didn't open up to people easily and didn't gain those kinds of attachments easily because it seems at least from the outside looking in that allen was not somebody who naturally formed relationships so that must have just been devastating to him and maybe that's part of why he had such a hard time getting close to people when that happens in your life at such an important age you can develop fears and and suddenly not want to get close to someone because what if it happens again what if the next person i get close to uh dies too you know i don't know if i can handle that again stuff like that his friend's death allen threw himself into trying to unravel the nature of consciousness and how it was linked to matter this led allen to think about the concept of the mind as a machine and you know this is something else i i want to talk about we're not necessarily talking about history right here we're talking more about psychology and things like that but my wife's a school counselor so it's kind of in in our discussions on a regular basis um you know people react to grief in different ways some people you know are depressed have a hard time even getting out of bed and i'm not judging how people react to grief everybody reacts to grief in their own way um other people they busy themselves i've known you know a couple of people very close to me who have passed away in the last couple of months um and their widows have responded to their deaths in very different ways um there's no right or wrong way to grieve for him he poured himself into work he kept his mind busy he focused on things that he could control it could be recreated with mathematical logic during attended king's college cambridge he received a distinguished degree in 1934 and a fellowship of king's college in 1935. he attended princeton university for a couple of years returning to england just prior to the war as war broke out in europe in 1939 turing went to work for the british cryptanalytic headquarters at bletchley park the people at bletchley park worked 24 hours a day to break a variety of german codes and give the allies prior knowledge of german intentions to be used on the battlefield skies and oceans and see inside the german right to try and understand the workings of the murderous regime so intel military military intelligence has always been a factor in war deceiving the enemy while simultaneously trying to figure out what he's up to spies have existed for millennia uh it's not anything new in world war ii trying to figure those things out but there does seem to be kind of a taking it to the next level i don't think there's ever been a war where cryptology and um espionage and those sorts of things played such a decisive role you know george washington had his culper spy ring during the american revolution which actually had a pretty decisive role at times in the war uh but i mean huge parts of world war ii come down to cryptology the battle of midway is all about the fact that the americans had deciphered the japanese code and knew where they were attacking and when normandy uh succeeds in large part because the allies were successful in deceiving the germans about when and where the attack was going to come in the invasion of europe and this is a big part of that at bletchley turing was known to be somewhat eccentric he would ride to work in a gas mask to protect him from pollen his bike had a bad chain and instead of replacing it he kept time in his head counting out the pedal rotations it would take before it fell off then repairing it before it did he would also chain his mug to a radiator to avoid it getting taken by someone else in hut 8 turing who was always referred to as prof and his team elaborated upon the early computer designed by poles working to break the german enigma machine codes so there you go they built on the work that was done by the polls and that's something they don't really talk about in the movie they make it seem like alan turing basically did this by himself i'm not downplaying alan turing's brilliance he was a brilliant mind probably more than anybody else responsible for what we know today is the modern computer and deserves credit for that i think he's on a 15 on a 50 pound note in the uk today and honored in that way and well deserved but it was a team effort and it was a multi-nation effort and i don't think alan turing was uh number one the way the imitation game makes it seem like he kind of thought he was better than everybody else and kind of wanted to work by himself and that everybody else kind of despised him and had a lot of disdain i don't think any of that's particularly accurate among the folks at bletchley park i think it was always a collaborative effort i think alan turing was always viewed uh respectfully you know they called him prof that was a sign of respect with this work and turing's ability to see patterns and equations the team in hut 8 began to break additional german codes most famously the u-boat codes which ordered the german submarine fleet towards their victims and hunting grounds as the war progressed and the ciphers became more complex turing and the team at bletchley invented more complicated machines to rapidly decrypt the german communications at its peak bletchley was decrypting 84 000 communications each month after world war ii 84 000 communications a month i mean you know break that down what are we talking about nearly 3 000 a day that's a lot of data to go through and it wasn't just turing and a couple of other people there were a lot of people working at bletchley park on this project two winston churchill called the submarine threat the only thing that really scared him during the war and that's absolutely true churchill did say that it was the u-boats that he was concerned about more than any he was concerned that they would get in a position where they would basically put a stranglehold on the uk to where they couldn't bring in supplies basically that what would be done to the uk in world war ii was what the allies had done to germany in world war one with their blockade cutting off supplies bleeding them dry you didn't have to invade them you just had to keep them from being able to survive on their own and he was really concerned that would happen with the u-boats though many worked on this problem and others without ensuring the solution to the problem might have taken much longer time which the allies did not have or may not have even happened at all his work undoubtedly shortened the war and saved many lives it also laid the groundwork for the technological age we live in today yep for his work during the war during was awarded the order of the british empire by the king but this like his work remained secret for years you know that's one of those things when you work in espionage even after the war is over a lot of that doesn't get talked about it was decades and even centuries before we knew who some of the people were in the culprit ring back in the 18th century for washington and a lot of this stuff has only been recently declassified and of course after the war you see a little bit of it in the movie the imitation game there was a time when homosexuality was a criminal offense in the uk uh and how he was treated after the war let's be honest it was disgraceful for somebody who really was a legit hero of the war who had done a ton of work to help the allies uh and then for him to be treated the way he was is uh in hindsight it's easy to say that but in hindsight it was pretty bad during was gay and in the decades before its decriminalization in 1967 homosexuality was persecuted and prosecuted in england as well as in many other nations after world war ii and as the cold war began to heat up turing was arrested for gross indecency taking a guilty plea during was offered prison or conditional probation he took probation as a condition of the probation he had to take large doses of hormone therapy the aim was to render him physically incapable of having sex and the treatment had terrible side effects on his health and well-being and um you know i'm not much of a judge of acting and things like that but i know it when i see it and uh benedict cumberbatch is acting especially in those post-war scenes is phenomenal uh he really captured what it must have been like for alan turing and like i said i i i feel pretty awful about how alan turing was treated i think most people do he was pardoned by the queen pretty brutal after his conviction he was barred from doing any further government work and his security clearance was revoked his past was subject to investigation as the authorities were worried that his homosexuality could have been used as blackmail by the soviet union now i will say this that that was a legit concern anytime there was something you had to keep secret that secret could potentially be viewed as a weakness that could be used against you and this is a time in the red scare and the growth of communism and and the cold wars developing and everybody was freaking out about everything and but in alan turing's defense the only reason he had to keep it secret is because they made it a crime in the first place no evidence of which has ever been found on june 8 1952 during's housekeeper found his body a half-eaten apple which was never checked for poison and a to-do list was by his bedside the official cause of death was suicide though many have cast doubt upon this conclusion in the years following his death turing's work became more and more recognized by the public so suicide by cyanide was the official cause i believe now i'm not suggesting this is especially this is possibly how it happened um but um if you chew on large numbers of apple seeds you can die from from cyanide poisoning apple seeds when chewed if you if you chew them up or if you grind them up and then swallow it it'll create cyanide in your system that can kill you but i think it takes like anywhere from like 100 to 150 seeds worth of this stuff to kill you um so i don't think he just died by accident from apples but um there there are questions about uh what was happening and certainly even if he did commit suicide it's an understandable situation where he was definitely just not in his right mind i mean imagine what those chemicals must have done to his mind and um pretty pretty awful stuff and a groundswell of support to rectify the injustice of turing's life came to the fore in 2009 after intense lobbying the prime minister of the united kingdom made an apology for the treatment of turing but he was not officially pardoned the uk justice minister said that a pardon was not considered appropriate as alan turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence okay but if as time goes on you realize you know what probably shouldn't have been a criminal offense uh and that's what ends up happening and i believe they even have a law now or like an unofficial kind of term like alan turing's law or something like that where anybody who was convicted of those offenses of homosexuality can receive a pardon and his was kind of the pioneering pardon that made those other ones possible 2012 many influential people including stephen hawking lobbied the uk government to officially pardon turing one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the modern era yet successes governments see me capable of forgiving his conviction for that end crime of being a homosexual in 2013 the queen gave during a royal pardon the prime minister david cameron said his actions saved countless lives he also left a remarkable national legacy through his substantial scientific achievements often being referred to as the father of modern computing stephen fry said at the time at bloody last next step a banknote if there's any justice yep in 2014 the movie the imitation game starring benedict cumberbatch and kira knightley was released depicting touring struggles and lending impetus to a new realization of his genius and knowledge of his persecution i'll be honest i didn't know much about alan turing before that movie came out and that's one of the great things about historical movies even if they get stuff wrong even if it's highly fictionalized for hollywood if it creates in us a hunger to know the real history i'll give you a perfect example of that is braveheart we all know braveheart's full of ridiculous inaccuracies but at its core it has the the fundamental truth that there was this guy william wallace who was a great freedom fighter for scotland and that led a lot of people myself included to hunger for the real story and so if it does that then i'm all for it and and imitation games certainly did that for the legacy of alan turing and the people of bletchley park in june 2019 the british government announced that turing's likeness would be placed on the 50-pound note a small comfort to those who knew and supported turing the note contains an appropriately enigmatic quote from turing this is only a foretaste of what is to come and only the shadow of what is going to be that's awesome uh a great man a man who has had a huge impact on the world not only in the past but even up to the present and long past dude that he was honored in that way so let me know your thoughts use the comment section below check out some of the other videos that i just mentioned in the description and uh definitely check out yarnhub i am a patron of yarnhub i'm wearing my patreon hoodie today they sent this to me because i'm part of their ambassador team now and so i i'm proud to support yarnhub on patreon and i'll encourage you to do that too thanks for watching you

Channel: Vlogging Through History

Views: 41,039

Keywords: historian reacts, world war two, historian reaction, history guy gaming, alan turing enigma, alan turing, enigma machine, reaction video, world war 2, second world war, history reaction, computer science, imitation game, imitation game history, enigma code

Id: NHnoeIKtfJg

Length: 20min 3sec (1203 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 06 2021