Bletchley Park (TheKaffeePolterGeist)
Posted: Thu Jan 08, 2015 10:13 am
JON grew up in Reigate, Surrey and spent many years in Whitstable in Kent, where he obtained a Masters in biochemistry. He worked in a reasearch facitily for many years before moving to Bletchley in Buckinghamshire where he is currently working at Bletchley Park as part of the Bombe rebuild team.
This is his story:
During the Second World War, Bletchley Park was the site of the United Kingdom’s main decryption establishment, the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), where ciphers and codes of several Axis countries were decrypted, most importantly the ciphers generated by the German Enigma and Lorenz machines. It also housed Station X, a secret radio intercept station. Although interception was soon moved to a location with better reception, the name persisted for the Bletchley Park wartime activities. During these years it was home to many notable mathematicians. Alan Turing was one of them.
The area I work in covers the story of the Bombe, an electro mechanical device used to help break the enigma cipher code.
It is common knowledge Turing used to chain his coffee cup to a radiator and around two years ago we found out why: when the Bombe started to work, strange things started to happen. Our percolator got broken and its replacement went missing. Also the supply of coffee started to vanish and on the odd occasion, we had a cup fall to the floor when there was no one near the table they were placed on
We deduced that the original KaffeePolterGeist from WWII had noticed that we were getting close, and decided to stop us.
When the Turing statue below was installed, it all stopped.
Picture below left shows the top half of A 1.5-ton, life-size statue of Turing which was unveiled on 19 June 2007 at Bletchley Park. Built from approximately half a million pieces of Welsh slate and picture below right shows a photo of Bletchley Park
During the Cheltenham Science festival week, we were challenged by GCHQ to try and break an enigma cipher message set by themselves ever day for the event. This included a live link up to their stand at the festival. We broke the code 3 days in a row then something strange happened. Our reserve coffee supply mysteriously dematerialised: gone to that great percolator in the sky. This is kept in a locked office and only the bombe team have access to the room. When we left that night, myself and a colleague who were the last to leave before the building was locked for the night, had both seen our spare supply of coffee.
Also on 2 separate days after this we came in to find the peculator jug was scalding hot even though the peculator was switched off at the mains supply and on the peculator itself.
JON grew up in Reigate, Surrey and spent many years in Whitstable in Kent, where he obtained a Masters in biochemistry. He worked in a reasearch facitily for many years before moving to Bletchley in Buckinghamshire where he is currently working at Bletchley Park as part of the Bombe rebuild team.
Source: http://www.spookyisles.com/2013/01/my-g ... hley-park/
This is his story:
During the Second World War, Bletchley Park was the site of the United Kingdom’s main decryption establishment, the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), where ciphers and codes of several Axis countries were decrypted, most importantly the ciphers generated by the German Enigma and Lorenz machines. It also housed Station X, a secret radio intercept station. Although interception was soon moved to a location with better reception, the name persisted for the Bletchley Park wartime activities. During these years it was home to many notable mathematicians. Alan Turing was one of them.
The area I work in covers the story of the Bombe, an electro mechanical device used to help break the enigma cipher code.
It is common knowledge Turing used to chain his coffee cup to a radiator and around two years ago we found out why: when the Bombe started to work, strange things started to happen. Our percolator got broken and its replacement went missing. Also the supply of coffee started to vanish and on the odd occasion, we had a cup fall to the floor when there was no one near the table they were placed on
We deduced that the original KaffeePolterGeist from WWII had noticed that we were getting close, and decided to stop us.
When the Turing statue below was installed, it all stopped.
Picture below left shows the top half of A 1.5-ton, life-size statue of Turing which was unveiled on 19 June 2007 at Bletchley Park. Built from approximately half a million pieces of Welsh slate and picture below right shows a photo of Bletchley Park
During the Cheltenham Science festival week, we were challenged by GCHQ to try and break an enigma cipher message set by themselves ever day for the event. This included a live link up to their stand at the festival. We broke the code 3 days in a row then something strange happened. Our reserve coffee supply mysteriously dematerialised: gone to that great percolator in the sky. This is kept in a locked office and only the bombe team have access to the room. When we left that night, myself and a colleague who were the last to leave before the building was locked for the night, had both seen our spare supply of coffee.
Also on 2 separate days after this we came in to find the peculator jug was scalding hot even though the peculator was switched off at the mains supply and on the peculator itself.
JON grew up in Reigate, Surrey and spent many years in Whitstable in Kent, where he obtained a Masters in biochemistry. He worked in a reasearch facitily for many years before moving to Bletchley in Buckinghamshire where he is currently working at Bletchley Park as part of the Bombe rebuild team.
Source: http://www.spookyisles.com/2013/01/my-g ... hley-park/