Before cracking Enigma, a teenage Turing cycled 60 miles to reach school
His first day at Sherborne School fell during the 1926 General Strike, with no trains running. Thirteen-year-old Alan Turing simply got on his bicycle and rode alone from Southampton to Sherborne, about 60 miles, sleeping at an inn on the way. That stubborn determination later helped the Allies read German naval messages.
Turing was born in Maida Vale, London, on 23 June 1912, while his father was on leave from the Indian Civil Service. With his parents often in India, he and his elder brother lodged with a retired army couple in Hastings. A primary headmistress declared that she had taught clever boys and hardworking boys, but Alan was a genius. His Sherborne headmaster was less impressed, fretting that a pure scientific specialist was wasting his time at a public school. Meanwhile the boy was solving advanced problems without having studied basic calculus, and at 16 he was working through Einstein.
At Sherborne he met Christopher Morcom, an athlete, photographer and amateur astronomer often described as his first love. Morcom introduced him to astronomy and teased him constantly. In February 1930 Morcom died of complications from bovine tuberculosis, just months after the pair sat scholarship exams at Trinity College, Cambridge. Turing kept writing to Morcom's mother for years, often on her son's birthday, and won a science prize she set up in his memory.
After King's College, Cambridge, and a 1938 doctorate from Princeton, Turing formalised the idea of an algorithm with the abstract device now called a Turing machine. In World War II he led Hut 8 at Bletchley Park, cracking German naval codes and improving the Polish bomba machine used to find Enigma settings. After the war his Automatic Computing Engine became an early blueprint for a machine that stores its own program, and predicted oscillating chemical reactions that were not observed until the 1960s.
Official secrecy kept much of this hidden. In 1952 he was prosecuted for a relationship with another man and sentenced to probation with chemical castration; an inquest ruled his death on 7 June 1954, at 41, a suicide. Gordon Brown apologised publicly in 2009, a royal pardon followed in 2013, and since 23 June 2021 his portrait has appeared on the Bank of England's 50 pound note.
Source: Alan Turing
