Alan Turing papers saved from shredder to be sold in Lichfield
Papers written by World War Two codebreaker Alan Turing are to go up for auction after they were found in a loft and almost shredded.The 1930s collection, which included a copy of Turing's PhD dissertation, is expected to make tens of thousands of pounds when it goes under the hammer in Lichfield, Staffordshire, on 17 June.Turing, considered by many as the father of modern computing, played a key role in WW2 in helping to break the German Enigma codes at Bletchley Park.Rare Book Auctions, which is handling the sale, said the papers were originally gifted to Turing's friend and fellow mathematician Norman Routledge.
After Mr Routledge died in 2013, the documents were found at his home in Bermondsey, London, and taken away by one of his sisters.One of Mr Routledge's nieces, who has not been named, said they were untouched for years until the sister moved into a care home.Her daughters found the collection and "considered shredding everything" before they checked with the nieces and nephews.
The niece said the family were "bowled over by the valuations and level of enthusiasm" after the collection was inspected by Rare Book Auctions.The papers were called offprints and were used as a method of correspondence between scholars.The PhD dissertation from 1938 or 1939, called Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals, is signed by Turing and has been valued at £40,000 to £60,000.Another paper called On Computable Numbers from 1936 or 37, which introduced the world to the idea of a "universal computing machine", was also valued at £40,000 to £60,000.The collection also includes a letter from Turing's mother Ethel, dated 16 May 1956, in which she wrote about the manner of her son's death and requests for her to write a biography.
Jim Spencer, director of Rare Book Auctions, described the collection as "the most important archive" he had ever handled."These seemingly plain papers - perfectly preserved in the muted colours of their unadorned, academic wrappers - represent the foundations of computer science and modern digital computing," he added.Before WW2 Turing invented the idea of a machine that could decode and perform any set of instructions and a decade later would design an electronic computer, capable of running any program.However, he was prosecuted for homosexual acts in 1952 and was chemically castrated before he died from cyanide poisoning in 1954, with an inquest concluding suicide.He received a posthumous royal pardon for his conviction in 2013.
Follow BBC Stoke & Staffordshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
18 minutes ago
- The Independent
Why the UK loves Dippy the Dinosaur so much
Dippy – a complete cast of a diplodocus skeleton – is Britain's most famous dinosaur. It has resided at the Natural History Museum in London since 1905 and is now on show in Coventry where it is 'dinosaur-in-residence' at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum. Dippy, the star attraction in the huge entrance hall of the Natural History Museum from 1979 to 2018, i s now on tour around the UK, with Coventry as its latest stop. It had previously been shown in Dorchester, Birmingham, Belfast, Glasgow, Newcastle, Cardiff, Rochdale, Norwich and London. So what is it that makes Dippy so popular? I got a sense of the dino's appeal in August 2021 when I gave a lecture under the Dippy skeleton in Norwich Cathedral. The lecture was about dinosaur feathers and colours. It highlighted new research that identified traces of pigment in the fossilised feathers of birds and dinosaurs. I wanted to highlight the enormous advances in the ways we can study dinosaurs that had taken place in just a century. Before arriving, I thought that Dippy would fill the cathedral – after all the skeleton is 26 metres long and it had filled the length of the gallery at the Natural History Museum. However, Dippy was dwarfed by the gothic cathedral's scale. In fact, the building is so large that five Dippys could line up, nose to tail, from the great west door to the high altar at the east end. This sense of awe is one of the key reasons to study palaeontology – to understand how such extraordinary animals ever existed. I asked the Norwich cathedral canon why they had agreed to host the dinosaur, and he gave three answers. First, the dinosaur would attract lots of visitors. Second, Dippy is from the Jurassic period, as are the rocks used to construct the cathedral. Finally, for visitors it shared with the cathedral a sense of awe because of its huge size. Far from being diminished by its temporary home, visitors still walked around and under Dippy sensing its grandeur. Dippy arrived in London in 1905 as part of a campaign for public education by the Scottish-American millionaire Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919). At the time, there was a debate in academic circles about the function of museums and how far professionals should go in seeking to educate the public. There was considerable reticence about going too far. Many professors felt that showing dinosaurs to the public would be unprofessional in instances where they moved from description of facts into the realm of speculation. They also did not want to risk ridicule by conveying unsupported information about the appearance and lifestyle of the great beasts. Finally, many professors simply did not see such populism as any part of their jobs. But, at that time, the American Museum of Natural History was well established in New York and its new president, Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935) was distinctly a populist. He sponsored the palaeo artist Charles Knight (1874-1953), whose vivid colour paintings of dinosaurs were the glory of the museum and influential worldwide. Osborn was as hated by palaeontology professors as he was feted by the public. Carnegie pumped his steel dollars into many philanthropic works in his native Scotland and all over America, including the Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. When he heard that a new and complete skeleton of a diplodocus had been dug up in Wyoming, he bought it and brought it to his new museum. It was named as a new species, Diplodocus carnegiei. On a visit to Carnegie's Scottish residence, Skibo Castle, King Edward VII saw a sketch of the bones and Carnegie agreed to donate a complete cast of the skeleton to Britain's Natural History Museum. The skeleton was copied by first making rubber moulds of each bone in several parts, then filling the moulds with plaster to make casts and colouring the bones to make them look real. The 292 pieces were shipped to London in 36 crates and opened to the public in May 1905. Carnegie's original Dippy skeleton only went on show in Pittsburgh in 1907, after the new museum building had been constructed. Carnegie had got the royal bug and donated further complete Dippy casts to the great natural history museums in Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Bologna, St Petersburg, Madrid, Munich, Mexico City and La Plata in Argentina. Each of these nations, except France, had a king or tsar at the time. The skeletons went on show in all these locations, except Munich, and Dippy has been seen by many millions of people in the past 120 years. Dippy's appeal Dippy's appeal is manifold. It's huge – we like our dinosaurs big. It has been seen up close by more people around the world than any other dinosaur. It also opens the world of science to many people. Evolution, deep time, climate change, origins, extinction and biodiversity are all big themes that link biology, geology, physics, chemistry and mathematics. Also, since 1905, palaeontology has moved from being a largely speculative subject to the realms of testable science. Calculations of jaw functions and limb movements of dinosaurs can be tested and challenged. Hypotheses about physiology, reproduction, growth and colour can be based on evidence from microscopic study of bones and exceptionally preserved tissues, and these analyses can be repeated and refuted. Dippy has witnessed over a century of rapid change and its appeal is sure to continue for the next.
Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE I've been arrested at the airport for eating fermented foods including 10-year-old butter and seal blubber - why I do it
The thought of eating any fermented food - let alone the likes of seal blubber or cheese - is enough to make anyone gag. But Dr. Johnny Drain, from Birmingham, has been doing so for years - having devoured everything from whale mouth and seal blubber to artichokes and stingless bee honey, all fermented. The chef's passion for fermentation - in which microorganisms such as bacteria and yeast convert the carbohydrates in foods to create a preserving effect - started as a child, when he and his grandma tried the process on yoghurt. He then took it a step further after getting a PhD in Materials Science at University of Oxford, combining his passions with food, working in Michelin-star restaurants all over the world. Ahead of the release of his debut book, Adventures in Fermentation, Johnny tells MailOnline: 'I had this real epiphany of like, f**k, everything delicious is fermented. 'And basically spent the last the 10 years of my life since researching fermentation, pushing pioneering new techniques within fermentation and also teaching.' But Johnny's love of fermenting food has got him into trouble at the airport on a number of occasions - due to the sheer amount of equipment he has to lug around, and he jokingly describes his suitcase as 'a cross between a drug smuggler and a bomb maker'. He explains: 'There are little sachets of white powders which contain spores for fungi that I teach people to grow that you can make soy sauce or miso paste with. The chef's passion for fermentation - in which microorganisms such as bacteria and yeast convert the carbohydrates in foods to create a preserving effect - started as a child, when he and his grandma tried the process on yoghurt 'And there's white powders, and then there's little machines that bubble air through things and temperature devices. So I look very dodgy.' Johnny admits he was even arrested at Gatwick Airport on suspicion of drug smuggling in 2020, on the way to Portugal, having just returned from Paraguay via Madrid. 'I got stopped,' he tells us. 'They told me they found traces of drugs on my on my bag, and then they had all of this stuff. 'And when someone asks you "So, what do you do?" And you explain to them, "Well, I just sort of go around the world eating food and helping people ferment things". 'They were like "Well, that's a that's not a proper job!"' Johnny continues: 'They were very polite. 'They said "Can we arrest you?" And I sort of said "Yeah, okay".' The chef was detained by police and given a full body scan to check if he was carrying drugs inside his body. 'I was formally arrested, and then they switched on this giant X-Ray machine,' he recalls. 'I went in there and obviously I hadn't swallowed any drugs. So they let me go.' With his connecting flight looming, Johnny was given a police escort to the awaiting aircraft, as his fellow passengers cautiously watched on. He laughs: 'I was flanked by these two policemen with machine guns, and everyone else on the flight was like "Who's this guy?"' Johnny has tried plenty of different fermented foods over the years, including tiny icefish in Japan, and canonical French cheeses in Patagonia. But it was ten-year-old butter that really left a lasting bitter taste for Johnny, when he tracked it down in Marrakesh. Describing the soured taste, he says: 'It really slaps you in the face, like a blue cheese, but with this bitterness and pungency. It's acrid. 'It's like this real spice that slaps the back of your throat. 'It's not for everyone, but definitely really interesting.' Johnny's debut book Adventures in Fermentation will be released on June 12 Although it's unlikely many people are going to follow in Johnny's footsteps of carrying around fermentation equipment, there's one must-have travel item he uses that actually makes things taste better. Johnny never flies without his Aeropress, a compact coffee maker, in his suitcase. He says: 'I just take that and a bag of good quality coffee grounds with me. 'And it means that I can be in the airport, I can be in the world's s**ttest hotel, and, instantly in the morning, all I need is a kettle and I can make an unbelievably decent cup of coffee.'
Sky News
2 hours ago
- Sky News
Rachel Reeves turning around UK's finances 'like Steve Jobs did for Apple', claims minister
Rachel Reeves will turn around the economy the way Steve Jobs turned around Apple, a cabinet minister has suggested ahead of the upcoming spending review. Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle compared the chancellor to the late Apple co-founder when asked on Sky News' Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips where the £86bn for his department is coming from. The package, confirmed ahead of the full spending review next week, will see each region in England granted £500m to spend on science projects of their choice, including research into faster drug treatments. Asked by Trevor Phillips how the government is finding the money, Mr Kyle said: "Rachel raised money in taxes in the autumn, we are now allocating it per department. "But the key thing is we are going to be investing record amounts of money into the innovations of the future. "Just bear in mind that how Apple turned itself around when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, they were 90 days from insolvency. That's the kind of situation that we had when we came into office. "Steve Jobs turned it around by inventing the iMac, moving to a series of products like the iPod. "Now we are starting to invest in the vaccine processes of the future, some of the high-tech solutions that are going to be high growth. We're investing in our space sector... they will create jobs in the future." The spending review is a process used by governments to set departmental budgets for the years ahead. Asked if it will include more detail on who will receive winter fuel payments, Mr Kyle said that issue will be "dealt with in the run-up to the autumn". "This is a spending review that's going to set the overall spending constraints for government for the next period, the next three years, so you're sort of talking about two separate issues at the moment," he said. 0:42 Scrapping universal winter fuel payments was one of the first things Labour did in government - despite it not being in their manifesto - with minsters saying it was necessary because of the financial "blackhole" left behind by the Tories. But following a long-drawn out backlash, Sir Keir Starmer said last month that the government would extend eligibility, which is now limited to those on pension credit. It is not clear what the new criteria will be, though Ms Reeves has said the changes will come into place before this winter. Mr Kyle also claimed the spending review will see the government invest "the most we've ever spent per pupil in our school system". However, he said the chancellor will stick to her self-imposed fiscal rules - which rule out borrowing for day-to-day spending - meaning that while some departments will get extra money, others are likely to face cuts.
