The Father of the Modern Computer - Alan Turing (1912-1954) - Erased Queer Stories Throughout History

Cover photo from Biography.com

Evan Rosenau

Between 2012 and 2022, the population of Americans who identified at LGBTQ+ increased by about 4%, more than 13.5 million people (Jones, 2022). There are many arguments on why this number has and continues to increase so dramatically.An answer is hard to determine and finding one is made more difficult by the lack of recorded LGBTQ+ history to look back on. Yet with careful examination, it is evident that queer people have existed for long before mid-way through the twentieth century. This series hopes to cover the countless stories of LGBTQ+ people from before pen first met paper, to the beginning of the Stonewall Uprising on June 28th, 1969. 

It should be noted, this series is meant to be informative and wishes only to highlight the lives of queer people throughout history, not to point with malice to any historical figures or practices which could have contributed to the erasure of these stories. In a similar vein, many of these stories may not have been well documented because of a lack of labels at the subject’s time in history, or because a person lived in a society which did not view homosexual relationships as abnormal, such as in ancient Greece which “featured at least five different varieties of same-sex relations” (Hubbard, 2020). 

This edition of Erased Queer Stories features Alan Turing, the “father of the modern day computer”, who made breakthroughs in mathematics, cryptanalysis, logic, philosophy, and mathematical biology, on top of being credited with breaking the Nazi Enigma Code.

Early Life

Born in London on June 3, 1912, Alan Mathison Turing spent his youth educating himself at Sherborne School, a “top private school” in Sherborne, England (Copeland, 2024). Turing would go on to study mathematics at the University of Cambridge, after which he entered a fellowship upon his graduation in 1934. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1938. 

Major Work

Recounting all of Turing’s work would take hours, with each feat having as drastic an impact as the last. Even in work as early as his dissertation at University of Cambridge, Turing was documenting groundbreaking discoveries. In his dissertation Turing proved the central limit theorem, an equation asserting that a sample of a reasonable size will maintain the same distribution at larger scales. This meant scientists could reliably gather data and use it to forecast what would occur with a larger sample. This dissertation was what earned him his fellowship upon graduation. In 1936, Turing proved the Entscheidungsproblem to be unsolvable. In brief, despite many mathematicians’ hopes, this meant there was no system in which all of mathematics could be reduced to methods human computers could do with any reasonable efficiency. In doing so, Turing proposed the Universal Turing Machine, capable of “computing anything that is computable” (Copeland, 2024). This machine utilized the same principles of and is considered the precursor to the modern digital computer. Unbelievably, these accomplishments pale in comparison to the work Turing would do later in life.

 In 1938, Turing joined the Government Code and Cypher School, switching to the organization’s wartime headquarters in Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire  at the onset of WWII. Here, he would begin his most secretive and arguably most impactful work. At the outbreak of the war, Polish mathematicians had made significant steps in understanding the German’s Enigma, a system for encrypting wartime messages. However, Germany reinforced the code by changing the cipher daily, heavily impeding the Allied forces (Imperial War Museums, n.d.). Fortunately, Turing was able to develop the Bombe, a code breaking machine which was vital to decoding this enhanced enigma and, at the height of the war, would assist cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park in decoding 84,000 encrypted communications a month (Copeland, 2024). 

Throughout the 1940’s Turing would continue to further his contributions to the war effort. In 1941, he devised a method called the “Banburismus” which, with the help of previous Enigma research, decoded highly encrypted German naval messages. This  allowed Allied ships to escape U-boat ambushes, saving numerous military lives (Imperial War Museums, n.d.). Moreover, in 1942, Turing developed the first systematic method to decoding messages “encrypted by the sophisticated German cipher machine that the British called ‘Tunny’” (Copeland, 2024). 

After the war, Turing was recruited to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL). His most notable contribution while working at NPL was his design of the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE). If built, Turing’s ACE would have had significantly more storage and been faster than other early computers. Unfortunately, colleagues at NPL felt the engineering was too difficult and decided to not move forward with production. Because of this, Turing moved his work to the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at the University of Manchester (CML) where he published the first-ever programming manual, used in the first marketable electronic digital computer in 1951.

Turing also pioneered the fields of artificial intelligence and modern cognitive science, theorizing on the organization of the brain and developing the ‘Turing Test’, criteria to determine whether an artificial computer is sentient. 

Queerness and Later Years

In March of 1952 Turing was convicted of “gross indecency” after admitting to police, who had responded to a break in, that he had relations with the male perpetrator. Homosexuality was illegal at the time, charged as  gross indecency under UK law. After being stripped of his government clearance because of the conviction, Turing was forced to choose between imprisonment and probation on the condition that he receive hormone “treatment”. He soon began a year of synthetic estrogen injections, enduring the “treatment” with “ what his close friend Peter Hilton called ‘amused fortitude,’” unwilling to succumb to the pressures of his time (Copeland, 2024). 

A year after these treatments ended, on June 7, 1954, Turing was found dead in his bed, an autopsy revealing he had four ounces of cyanide in his stomach. Offically, his death was ruled a suicide, though there is debate as to the validity of this arguement, as Turing showed no signs of an impaired mental state nor had any motive to take his own life. Some argue his death could have been simple accident, the result of inhaling cyanide fumes from the laboratory adjoining his bedroom. Others argue murder could not be ruled out as “ Turing knew so much about cryptanalysis at a time when homosexuals were regarded as threats to national security” (Copeland, 2024). 

Legacy

Turing’s legacy lives on to this day. His work at Bletchley Park most likely shortened WWII by a number of years and was instrumental in saving countless lives.  His work at NPL and CML helped provide a base for the development of all forms of computers today, including laptops, tablets and smartphones. More recently, the Turing Test has proven vital in the development of artificial intelligence. With the advent of ChatGPT, for example, many argue the criteria of the Turing Test have been met and that artificial consciousness has been created. 

However, Alan Turing’s impact reaches far beyond the fields of science and mathematics. Most prominently, Turing is the informal namesake for the UK’s 2017  Policing and Crime Act, which pardons those charged with “gross indecency” under the country’s previous laws. His story was even made into a movie, The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, though some debate if this 2014 retelling adequately portrays Turing’s sexuality.

Ultimately, Alan Turing is a tribute to the feats the LGBTQ+ community is capable of, proving sexuality does not define one’s abilities. This story serves as a shining example of queer history brushed over, hidden, or lost to time: a brilliant scientist whose name is not known as well as it should be, stripped of his authority and minimized in history books because of his sexuality. Fortunately, we can now view his story unannotated. 

References

Biography.com Editors. (2014, April 2). Alan Turing - Education, Movie & Quotes. Biography (Bio.). Retrieved August 31, 2024, from https://www.biography.com/scientists/alan-turing

Copeland, B. (2024, August 25). Alan Turing - Computer Designer, Codebreaker, Enigma. Britannica. Retrieved August 31, 2024, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alan-Turing/Computer-designer

Hubbard, T. K. (2020, May 29). Historical Views of Homosexuality: Ancient Greece. oxfordre.com. Retrieved August 31, 2024, from https://oxfordre.com/politics/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228637-e-1242

Imperial War Museums. (n.d.). How Alan Turing Cracked The Enigma Code. Imperial War Museums. Retrieved August 31, 2024, from https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/how-alan-turing-cracked-the-enigma-code

Jones, J. M. (2022, February 17). LGBT Identification in U.S. Ticks Up to 7.1%. Gallup News. Retrieved August 31, 2024, from https://news.gallup.com/poll/389792/lgbt-identification-ticks-up.aspx

LaMorte, W. W. (2016, July 24). Central Limit Theorem with a Normal Population. sph.bu.edu. Retrieved August 31, 2024, from https://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-Modules/BS/BS704_Probability/BS704_Probability12.html

Turing, J. D. (2017, March 1). Alan Turing’s Law. Royal Society. Retrieved August 31, 2024, from https://royalsociety.org/blog/2017/03/alan-turings-law/