In the summer of 1954, a 41-year-old mathematician bit into an apple laced with cyanide. Alan Turing died alone in his small house in Wilmslow, England, two years after the British government had forced him to undergo chemical castration as punishment for being gay. The coroner ruled it suicide, though some who knew him wondered.

What makes Turing's story so gutting isn't just the injustice—it's the scale of the debt we owed him. This was the man whose work at Bletchley Park shortened World War II by an estimated two years, potentially saving fourteen million lives. He'd imagined computers before they existed and laid the groundwork for artificial intelligence. Britain repaid him with a criminal conviction and hormone injections that caused him to grow breasts.

The Enigma machine was a cipher device so complex that it could produce 158 million million million possible settings. German commanders were so confident in its security that they transmitted their most sensitive military communications through it—U-boat coordinates, troop movements, invasion plans. The mathematics said breaking Enigma was impossible. Alan Turing didn't much care what the mathematics said.

Turing arrived at Bletchley Park in 1939, a gangly, eccentric Cambridge don who tied his tea mug to a radiator so colleagues wouldn't steal it and rode his bicycle wearing a gas mask to ward off hay fever. His colleagues found him odd. They also noticed he was thinking about problems differently than anyone else. Rather than attacking Enigma's settings directly, Turing exploited a fundamental weakness: the machine could never encode a letter as itself. A could become any letter except A.

From this single flaw, Turing built the Bombe—an electromechanical device that could test Enigma settings at superhuman speed. By 1942, Bletchley Park was reading German naval communications regularly. Winston Churchill called the codebreakers 'the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled.' The secret was so closely held that Turing's contribution wasn't publicly acknowledged until decades after his death. He'd saved millions and no one could know.

Takeaway

The impossible often has a hidden flaw waiting for someone stubborn enough to find it. Turing didn't outcompute Enigma—he outsmarted it by finding the one thing it couldn't do.

The Bombe was a single-purpose machine, built only to crack Enigma. But working with it planted a seed in Turing's mind. In 1936, even before the war, he'd published a paper describing a theoretical 'universal machine' that could compute anything computable by following simple instructions on a tape. It was pure abstraction then. Now he'd seen the power of mechanized thought.

After the war, Turing threw himself into building actual computers. At the National Physical Laboratory and later at Manchester University, he helped design some of the earliest programmable electronic computers. But his ambitions went further. In 1950, he published 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence,' opening with the question: Can machines think? He proposed what we now call the Turing Test—if a machine could fool a human into thinking it was human through conversation, we'd have to take its intelligence seriously.

Colleagues thought he was dabbling in science fiction. Turing was asking questions that wouldn't become mainstream for half a century. He imagined machines that could learn, that could surprise their creators, that could develop capabilities their programmers never explicitly gave them. Today, as we argue about large language models and artificial general intelligence, we're essentially still wrestling with puzzles Turing framed in 1950.

Takeaway

Turing didn't just help build the first computers—he asked the questions we're still trying to answer. The gap between creating a tool and wondering if the tool might become a mind is smaller than we think.

In January 1952, Turing reported a burglary at his home. The investigation that followed uncovered something the police found far more interesting than stolen property: evidence that Turing had been in a relationship with a man named Arnold Murray. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain. Turing was arrested, tried, and convicted of 'gross indecency'—the same charge that had destroyed Oscar Wilde fifty years earlier.

Given the choice between prison and chemical castration through estrogen injections, Turing chose the hormones. The treatment was supposed to eliminate his sexual urges. Instead, it caused depression, impotence, and gynecomastia—the development of breast tissue. His security clearance was revoked. He was barred from continuing his government work. The man who had saved his country was now considered a security risk because his sexuality might make him vulnerable to blackmail. The cruelty was perfectly bureaucratic.

Turing endured two years of this before his death. Whether he intended suicide or accidentally poisoned himself during a chemistry experiment remains debated. What's certain is that Britain had taken one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century and systematically humiliated him. In 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an official apology. In 2013, Queen Elizabeth granted Turing a posthumous pardon. The gestures came sixty years too late for a man who deserved gratitude, not persecution.

Takeaway

Societies can simultaneously benefit from genius and destroy the person who provides it. The same Britain that Turing saved couldn't tolerate who he was. Gratitude, it turns out, has limits that prejudice doesn't.

Turing's face now appears on the British fifty-pound note—the highest denomination, reserved for the nation's greatest. It's a fitting tribute and an inadequate apology. You can't undo chemical castration with currency.

What remains is the work and the warning. Turing gave us the intellectual foundations of the digital age and the first serious framework for thinking about machine intelligence. He also showed us how easily societies waste their best people. The question isn't whether we've learned that lesson. The question is whether we've learned it well enough.