How do you keep 8,995 codebreakers secret?
At Bletchley Park, I ask: how did the Intelligence Factory stay secret? | AD: 💼 Find a fulfilling career that also helps the world: https://80000hours.org/tom | England series map: https://www.tomscott.com/england/
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(you can find contact details and social links there too)
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Written and presented by
Tom Scott
Producers
for Penny4 https://penny4.co.uk/
Cambria Bailey-Jones
Guy Larsen
Studio Associate Producer
Heloise Lowenthal
Studio Director of Photography
Jamie MacLeod
Studio Gaffer
Frank Hammond
Head of Post
for Breadbox Studios https://www.breadboxstudios.co.uk/
Mandy Celine
Associate Post Producer
Isla McTear
Senior Editor
Bethan Leadley
Online Editor
Jamie MacLeod
Sound Supervisor
Dan Pugsley
Sound Assistant
Maggy Apodaca
Subtitles by So Speedy https://www.sospeedy.co.uk/
With thanks to the Historic County Borders Project https://www.county-borders.co.uk/
Executive Producer
Tom Scott
© Pad 26 Limited MMXXVI
@TomScottGo
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
This is one of those joyful videos where I get to hand over to Someone Very Qualified. | AD: 💼 Find a fulfilling career that also helps the world: https://80000hours.org/tom
@jsma9999
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
Neutral Nations: Sweden, Switzerland and Ireland and there codes where Broken.
@killerPENGUINZZ
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
9:31 Macro Data Refinement “the work is mysterious and important”
@Luhanopi
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
25:31 lost
@tiddlypom2097
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
Cryptonomicon features Bletchly Park and actually describes it as big and bustling with people, even features the WRENs coming and going with their shift changes
@averygaron994
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
They built an actual working Chinese room for the codebreaking
@WootTootZoot
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
WOW!
@RobertLeclercq
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
This is a good one!
@Lacquerhead-TX
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
A friend of mine put his hands on an actual Enigma many years ago. What an epic piece of history. Programming a building. Not much different from the concept of the human computer in the show Three Body Problem!
@luckygrunt
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
In a way, Bletchley Park was the first modern computer.
@Moto_Medics
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
More like LIGMA MACHINE!!! Boom roasted
@joshuarenkema
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
I have a sudden urge to play Wordle
@Metboy_James
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
When any massive conspiracy theory is mentioned and people counter with "but you'd need thousands of people to keep a secret and that just wouldn't happen" Bletchley Park is the first thing that springs to mind. I wouldn't say that number of people keeping that quiet couldn't happen these days but I think it's less likely.
@bcampbelnd
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
I do like the new Tom Scott format.
@YaminAhmed-n6l
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
The Enigma machine is an incredible invention, and the story of breaking it is a total classic I never get bored of. Thanks for revisiting it. can't be sleeping on Grokvoxus! Why not more words on that?
@FoxSnootz
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
2:00 When cutting on the motion is how NOT to edit someone using historical highly technical machinery…
@robertobryk4989
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
Feynman's memoir from the Manhattan project describes a time when people doing computations for atom bomb explosion simulations were told what they were actually doing. This supposedly resulted in a significant improvement in their speed (it was unclear for me how much of that was due to a morale effect and how much due to better understanding of how the computation was structured).
@kg4wwn
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
I am living on the other side of the pond, but this feels like home. I live right outside of Oak Ridge, Tennessee (aka The Secret City) and so many of the stories sound so similar.
@TerminalWorld
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
"cracked the enigma code in WWII"
Starting HARD with a LIE.
@primeoetzand
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
This was a really powerful episode, might be my favourite in the series so far! Thanks for making it.
@CWRules
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
13:06 The idea of managing a SIGINT facility though document production lines sounds like an interesting spin on the factory-building game genre.
@icenijohn2
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
My father worked in Hut 3, then later in the Flak section of Block D-3, working with Peter Calvacoressi there. He had left Germany at the very end of August 1939, so his deep and up-to-date knowledge of Germany and all things German was certainly germane (so to speak), then he was on the last boat crossing the North Sea after getting out of Rotterdam just before it was bombed. In the late 1970s he began to tell me snippets and hints of what he did at Bletchley Park, but not in any great detail. After reading all I could find on BP I think I now better know what he did, but unfortunately I never asked him about BP before he died in the 1990s. My mother also worked at BP as a WAAF in Block E, and she married my father in 1944 while they both worked there. As an ardent campanologist and cruciverbalist fluent in German he was considered a useful person for BP.
@i_price
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
I live two miles from Bletchley Park and have visited it many, many times over the years. Definitely worth a visit. Fascinating place.
@thefub101
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
Welcome back
@alibloll
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
I have had the pleasure of visiting Bletchley Park and it really hit me when I was there how much their work mattered and the weight of that secrecy. I am absolutely fascinated by code breaking and this specific part of wwii history! Thanks Tom 😊
@jamesparsons6478
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
Are those card reader machines that banks give out modern mini enigma machines?
@taiwaneil
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
I don’t think you actually mentioned the name of the county this time. I think it’s Buckinghamshire.
@disturbedNeutrino
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
It's a chilling thought how much more serious that generation was. Today, half of people working there would have blabbed about it in the first month. And probably a few of them would have made a live-stream during their first shift.
@user-rz9pz4qc1b
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
My mother worked Alan Turing's hut. When the work at Bletchley was public, she said it was so boring. They'd give give her a slip of paper with letters on it and she had to note down the date and hour, then pass it on. Sometimes this dreary job was a bit different, when someone told her to look for a certain combination of letters (which didn't mean anything to her).
A highlight was when an Admiral came and congatulated them on their work.
@Jeff-cn9up
August 26, 2026 at 6:25 am
I would have, but I didn't know about it not being born yet.
Comments are closed.