Cryptography involves encoding a message so that someone who it is not intended for does not easily read it. An encrypted message is meant to be read by the person who sent it and the person who receives it.

Easy cryptography uses redirecting the alphabet from one set of characters to another. Each letter is represented by some other character of the same alphabet. The person, who receives the encrypted message and decodes it, uses the same code by matching the encrypted letters to the original letters and makes the original message. This type of code is very simple and easy to break. Not useful for top secret or sensitive messages.

Countries, especially during wars, need to send messages that the enemy can't decipher. Many ideas came to mind by these hostile nations, like torches placed in various positions. Other ideas were semaphore, firing guns, telegraph,radio, pigeons, riders on horses, or just hand written notes.

The Germans came up with a device they called the Enigma machines. During World War II, the German armed forces tried to keep their communications secret by using encryption devices. The sophisticated coding devices could generate millions of different codes. The Germans thought they were too hard for the Allies to break. They were wrong.

Arthur Scherbius, in 1918 patented his cipher machine. This machine was invented to help businesses communicate their confidential documents without using hand written codes. His invention consisted of 26 rotors (blades on a wheel that turned and had each letter of the alphabet) that had numbers marked on their edges. The operator could set the starting point for each rotor on the wheel. Each rotor had an electrical contact. The contacts on one side were randomly connected. The machine was not a commercial success, and then he offered it to the German Navy. The military rejected it. Scherbius continued to work on his invention.

The war broke out and soon the Germany military changed their mind and the Enigma was in use and modified for top secret communications. This so-called unbreakable code machine was in full use. Several reasons behind this unfound faith in this machine was that the allies were working on breaking the code, German operators who didn't know how to use the machine, not changing the codes often enough, or the code book itself was stolen.

The first modern hackers, the Polish mathematicians, began working on breaking the early codes. They used commercial machines, which was six Enigma machines attached together. They called this the Bombe. As the war continued into Poland, these mathematicians took their work to the allies. The early years, the codes were easily broken. The next few years, the codes withstood the best efforts of the allies. By 1943, the codes were broken.

This was not as easy as it sounds. Encrypted messages meant figuring out the code for a particular day and then being able to break it. The allies were breaking German and Japanese codes. The Axis or the enemies of the allies were also busy breaking codes. The importance of code breaking was credited with shortening the war or even winning it. It played a crucial role in bringing the horror to an end.