Colossus engineer’s tools on display 75 years after code-breaking computer’s birth

By: Dominic Lenton

Visitors to the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park will be able to see some of the original tools that were used to maintain the WWII code-breaking computer Colossus thanks to a donation from the family of a wartime engineer.

Seventy-five years after construction of the first Colossus began, the 20 tools and tool bag that originally belonged to the late Henry (John) Cane and have been donated by his family are going on display alongside the museum’s rebuilt version of the pioneering computer.

The General Post Office engineer was a member of one of the dedicated teams that built and kept the Colossus computers running almost continuously at Bletchley Park from February 1944 until the end of the Second World War.

In December 1943, the first Colossus was being built and tested by Tommy Flowers and his colleagues at Dollis Hill, the London laboratories of the General Post Office. Flowers had taken the bold step of creating a machine with 1500 valves that could be programmed to run the code-breaking algorithms devised by the mathematician Bill Tutte.

The prototype is believed to have had its first successful trial run on 8 December 1943. Later that month, or possibly in January 1944, it was moved to Bletchley Park where it was reassembled and broke its first Lorenz message on 5 February.

By the end of the war, ten Colossus machines were running around the clock, operated by Wrens (members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service) and maintained by teams of engineers like John Cane. The tools they used were designed for use in Strowger analogue telephone exchanges but became critical to the war effort because Tommy Flowers, a telephone engineer by training, built Colossus mostly with the telecommunications components that were familiar and available to him.

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