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Concept
Tommy Flowers
Summary
Thomas Harold Flowers MBE (22 December 1905 – 28 October 1998) was an English engineer with the British General Post Office. During World War II, Flowers designed and built Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer, to help decipher encrypted German messages.
Flowers was born at 160 Abbott Road, Poplar in London's East End on 22 December 1905, the son of a bricklayer.
Whilst undertaking an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, he took evening classes at the University of London to earn a degree in electrical engineering. In 1926, he joined the telecommunications branch of the General Post Office (GPO), moving to the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill in north-west London in 1930.
In 1935, Flowers and Eileen Margaret Green were married. The couple later had two children, John and Kenneth.
From 1934 onward, he explored the use of electronics in telephone exchanges. By 1939, his design of equipment using 3000 to 4000 valves was in limited operation for (say) 1000 lines at an exchange with each line having three or four valves. Note that this was for (amplified) long distance or trunk lines between exchanges (central offices), using in-band signalling with switching at each end carried out by electromechanical switches or operators. As Flowers remarked, at the outbreak of war “he was possibly the only person in Britain who realised that valves could be used reliably on a large scale for high-speed computing. He was convinced that an all-electronic system was possible. A background in switching electronics would prove crucial for his computer designs.
Flowers' first contact with wartime codebreaking came in February 1941 when his director, W. Gordon Radley, was asked for help by Alan Turing, who was working at Bletchley Park, the government codebreaking establishment, north west of London in Buckinghamshire. Turing wanted Flowers to build a counter for the relay-based Bombe machine, which Turing had developed to help decrypt German Enigma codes.
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