Christie's
Sale 7882
Valuable Printed Books and Manuscripts
23 November 2010
London, King Street
Including:
Lot Description
BABBAGE, Charles (1791-1871). 'On a method of expressing by signs the action of machinery'. Offprint from: Philosophical Transactions vol. 116, pt 3. London: W. Nicol for the Royal Society, 1826.
4° (257 x 196mm). [ii], 16pp. Four engraved plates, one folding. (Outer margin of three plates cropped touching plate mark but not affecting image, edges of plate a bit dust-soiled.) Later wrappers, recent cloth box. Provenance: CHARLES BABBAGE (faded inscription 'With the author's compliments' on title).
FIRST EDITION, PRESENTATION COPY OF THE RARE OFFPRINT ISSUE, of Babbage's first publication of his system of mechanical notation that enabled him to describe the logic and operation of his machines on paper as they would be fabricated in metal. Babbage later stated that 'Without the aid of this language I could not have invented the Analytical Engine; nor do I believe that any machinery of equal complexity can ever be contrived without the assistance of that or of some other equivalent language. The Difference Engine No. 2 ... is entirely described by its aid' (Babbage 1864, 104). More than one hundred years later, in the 1930s, when developments in logic were applied to switching systems, Claude Shannon demonstrated in his famous master's thesis that Boolean algebra could be applied to the same types of problems for which Babbage had designed his mechanical notation system. ONLY THREE COPIES OF THE OFFPRINT CAN BE IDENTIFIED VIA WORLDCAT: Harvard, Detroit and California State. Only Harvard's, however, is certainly the offprint issue (author's presentation copy 'To Professor Jacobi from the Author'), while the other two are most probably the journal issue. Hyman p.58; Van Sinderen 27. OOC 37.
Lot Description
'ENIGMA' -- Cipher Machine. A three-rotor Enigma machine, number A-9457, with electric core, three aluminium rotors each stamped WaA618, raised 'QWERTZ' keyboard with crackle black painted metal case (some restoration), three division window flap over rotors and plugboard in the front with ten patch leads, with metal label 'Chiffriermaschinen Gesellschaft Heimsoeth und Rinke, Berlin W.35 Ludendorffstraße 6' on the inside of the lid, circa 1939. Modern power supply. 260 x 320 x 140mm.
A three-rotor ENIGMA, the standard German electronic ciphering machine widely used in World War II. It derives from a 1919 patent of a Dutch inventor, H.A. Koch; an early design marketed by Dr. Arthur Scherbius was bought out by the German military in 1929 and placed in service. ENIGMA in several variants was used by the German Navy, the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the state railroad system, the Abwehr (intelligence) and the SS.
It was designed with a complex, interchangeable series of three rotors bearing the 26-character alphabet, a 'reflector' and a plugboard with movable connecting cords that connected pairs of letters. As an added precaution, the base or starting settings for the rotors was changed every 24 hours, according to pre-printed setting registers furnished in advance or supplied daily by courier. It has been calculated that the 3-rotor ENIGMA, with plugboard in use, made possible a total of 15 billion billion possible readings for each character.
ENIGMA was widely regarded by the Germans as too complex to be broken, but in the 1930s a team of Polish analysts (Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rszycki and Henryk Zygalski), made remarkable progress in working out the machine's basic system, identified its vulnerabilities and succeeded in deciphering much of the encrypted German radio traffic. Their findings, including plans for very useful mechanical devices known as 'bombes', which aided in the decryption operation, were secretly passed on in 1939 to French and British investigators. An elite team of cryptanalysts, mathematicians and engineers including Alan Turing (see lot 60) were established in a top-secret facility at Bletchley Park. For the rest of the war that legendary team's heroic and unstinting efforts gradually accomplished the seemingly insurmountable task of deciphering an enormous volume of encrypted communications. The critical intelligence deriving from their decipherment was dubbed ULTRA and was employed cautiously but to great effect during the war; some commentators credit ULTRA with shortening the war by some two years.
Lot Description
TURING, Alan Mathison (1912-1954). A collection of Alan Turing's offprints formed by Prof. Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman (1897-1984), 1936-1954, comprising:
TURING'S FIRST PUBLISHED PAPER:
'Equivalence of left and right almost periodicity.' Offprint from: Journal of the London Mathematical Society, vol. 10. London: 1935.
THE FOUNDATION OF MODERN DIGITAL COMPUTING:
'On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.' Offprint from: Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, ser. 2, vol. 42. London: November 12th 1936. Provenance: MAX NEWMAN (light annotation in his hand in red chinagraph and lead pencil). [With:] 'On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem. A correction.' Offprint from: Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, ser. 2, vol. 43. London: 1937. Provenance: E. S[ARA] TURING (pencil signature of Turing's mother).
AUTHOR'S PRESENTATION OFFPRINTS TO HIS MENTOR:
'Computability and -\kl\K definability.' Offprint from: Journal of Symbolic Logic, vol. 2, no. 4. Princeton, NJ: 1937. [And:] 'Finite approximations to lie groups.' Offprint from: Annals of Mathematics, vol. 39, no. 1. Princeton, NJ: 1938. [And:] 'Practical forms of type theory.' Offprint from: The Journal of Symbolic Logic, vol. 13, no. 2. Princeton, NJ: 1948. Provenance: all inscribed in pencil IN TURING'S HAND with the name: -- M[ax] H.A. Newman.
TURING'S PIONEERING WORK ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE:
'Computing machinery and intelligence.' Offprint from: MIND: a quarterly review of psychology and philosophy, vol. LIX, no. 236. London: 1950.
THE ONLY PUBLISHED EVIDENCE OF TURING'S WORK ON THE AUTOMATIC COMPUTING ENGINE, AND HIS ONLY WORK WITH A COMMERCIAL APPLICATION:
'Rounding-off errors in matrix processes.' Offprint from: The Quarterly Journal of Mechanics and Applied Mathematics, vol. I, part 3. Oxford: 1948. [With:] Three Patent Specifications referring to Turing's invention, use and development of mercury acoustic delay lines as a means of computer memory storage, various dates, 1953-1954, each Patent including diagrams of apparatus.
The collection also includes TURING SIGNATURES, WHICH ARE EXTREMELY RARE IN COMMERCE:
[NEWMAN, Maxwell Herman Alexander & Lyn Irvine NEWMAN]. Visitors' book of the Newman household, 1945-1963, INCLUDING 4 SIGNATURES OF ALAN TURING, 24-26 Feb 1947, 27-28 Nov 1947, 1-2 June 1948 & 2-5 July 1948, other signatures of early computing pioneers including Shaun Wylie and Pat Blackett, 20 ff. of mss, 4°. Turing, as a good friend of the Newmans, visited them on several occasions. His name appears (in pencil in Lyn Newman's hand) for 9-14 April 1954; and rather poignantly, his mother's signature appears 6 visits further down the page 18-25 June 1954, ten days after Alan's death.
Sold with SEVEN OTHER OFFPRINTS, including his work on morphogenesis, as well as copies of 'Solvable and unsolvable problems' in Science News no. 31 (Penguin Books, 1954) and Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, vol. 1. London: 1955. This latter contains Newman's obituary of Turing, complete with a bibliography, for the compilation of which this collection of offprints was assembled. Contained in a modern cloth box.
AN UNPARALLELED COLLECTION OF THE WRITINGS OF THE FOUNDER OF MODERN COMPUTING SCIENCE, AND ONE THAT IS UNLIKELY TO BE REPLICATED. It was Max Newman, one of Turing's few supporters and friends, who in 1935 introduced Turing to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, and in particular to the question: is mathematics decidable? Turing tackled this problem, known by its German name, Entscheidungsproblem, by producing a paper of startling originality: On Computable Numbers. In it, he described how machines might be able to produce lists of computable numbers that would give rise to irrational numbers. This demonstrated that mathematics was undecidable, and in turn demolished the Entscheidungsproblem.
As it turned out, Turing had been pre-empted by Prof. Alonso Church at Princeton who had come to the same conclusion by using \kl\K calculus. However, Newman, convinced that the greatness of Turing's paper lay in its application of machines to mathematical problems, arranged for Church to referee On Computable Numbers, and it was duly published in 1936. Despite a review by Church in the Journal of Symbolic Logic in which the phrase 'Turing machine' was used for the first time, Turing only received two requests for offprints.
However, it was on the back of On Computable Numbers, that Turing was awarded a visiting Fellowship to Princeton, where he worked with Church. There he also renewed his aquaintance with John von Neumann. Turing was already familiar with von Neumann's work -- his first published paper was a small refinement of a paper written in 1934 by von Neumann regarding group theory. This group theory was later to become extremely valuable in the cryptanalytic work at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. The collection contains two other offprints on group theory, one of which, Finite approximations to lie groups, arose through von Neumann. Later, von Neumann himself came to talk about Turing in the highest terms, and was to lead the vanguard of American computing science (see lots 62 and 64).
Turing's unusual ability to harness mathematical theory of the highest order to practical engineering was to make him invaluable at Bletchley. Indeed, at Princeton he gained access to the machine shop of the Physics Dept. and made an electric multiplier to generate secret numbers for cipher work. Just before the outbreak of hostilities, Turing had met Polish cryptanalysts in Paris (see lot 59), where vital information was exchanged about the configuration of Enigma and the adoption of the 'bombes' that were used to break Enigma codes. Later, Max Newman was to join Bletchley, where he provided the mathematical theory, derived in part from Turing, to develop Colossus, 'the world's first large-scale electronic, as distinct from electromagnetic, computer' (ODNB).
After the war, Turing and Newman went their separate ways. Turing went to work at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), Teddington, where he helped develop the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE). Newman took the chair as Fielden professor of mathematics at Manchester University (1945-1964), and oversaw the Royal Society-funded Manchester computing project. Despite working on rival projects, Turing often visited the Newmans. Turing, eventually tiring of the internal politics of the NPL (and they probably could not cope with his unorthodox methods), was easily lured away by Newman to join the Manchester 'Baby' project.
It was during this period that Turing produced his seminal paper on artifical intelligence and proposed the 'Turing test' to determine a machine's ability to demonstrate intelligence. He also produced a tour de force of applied mathematics with his paper The chemical basis of morphogenesis (1952). At the time when Watson and Crick were unravelling the physical structure of DNA (see lot 86), Turing was grappling with a theoretical understanding of how information might be inherited.
'The varied titles of Turing's published work disguise its unity of purpose. The central problem with which he started, and to which he constantly returned, is the extent and the limitations of mechanistic explanations of nature' (Newman, obit., p.256).
TURING MANUSCRIPT MATERIAL AND OFFPRINTS ARE OF THE UTMOST RARITY; THERE ARE NO RECORDS OF EITHER APPEARING AT AUCTION IN THE PAST 35 YEARS.
For a full list of items in the present lot, and a complete condition report, please refer to department, or view the condition report online at www.christies.com (21)