Museum finds part of Nazi cipher machine on eBay

Last week the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park discovered the teleprinter of a Lorenz SZ42 cipher machine for sale as a “telegram machine” on eBay. Museum volunteers went to Southend to inspect it in person. They found it in its original case on the floor of a shed, confirmed it was a Lorenz teleprinter and paid the seller the “Buy it now” price of £9.50 ($14). It is going on display with a Lorenz SZ42 code machine loaned by the Norwegian Armed Forces Museum to tell the full story of how the British broke the Lorenz code.

The Lorenz SZ42 cipher machine was used to transmit the top-secret messages of the German High Command to Army Commands in German-occupied countries. The operator would type the message in plain text on the keyboard of a teleprinter connected to the Lorenz cipher machine which would then convert the message into code. It was in widespread use from 1942 until the end of the war, and with 12 wheels each with a different number of cams, the code it generated was deemed unbreakable.

Andy Clark, chairman of the trustees at The National Museum of Computing, said the Lorenz was stationed in secure locations as “it was far bigger than the famous portable Enigma machine”.

“Everybody knows about Enigma, but the Lorenz machine was used for strategic communications,” said Clark.

“It is so much more complicated than the Enigma machine and, after the war, machines of the same style remained in use.”

Little did the Nazis know the British deciphered the code six months after the first experimental Lorenz SZ40 started sending data in June of 1941. A remarkable feat of reverse engineering by cryptographer Bill Tutte cracked the code in January 1942. Tutte and his team at Bletchley Park figured out the design and function of the machine without ever having seen one. Operator error in a message transmitted from Athens to Vienna on August 30th, 1941, gave the cryptographers a unique opportunity Bletchley to figure out the plain text and the keystream.

Bletchley analysts saw their first Lorenz cipher machine in 1945. By then they had intercepted and read enormously important tactical messages for four years. That’s how the Allies were able to confirm that the Germans had swallowed their bluff that the D-Day landings were happening at Calais. The breaking of Lorenz also played a major role in the construction of Colossus, the first programmable computer. Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers devised Colossus to calculate the positions of the 12 wheels of the Lorenz code machine in hours rather than weeks.

The Lorenz SZ42 encryption machine is extremely rare. Only 200 were built during the war and just four known examples survive. Lorenz teleprinters, on the other hand, were standard production, with a large number of commercial models manufactured. The military-issue teleprinter is much more rare than the commercial models. Bletchley staff first thought it was a standard commercial teleprinter. They only realized it was the rarer military issue, complete with its wartime serial number, swastika accents and a special key for the insignia of the Waffen-SS, when they brought it back to the museum for cleaning and conservation.

The code machine is missing its motor. The museum hopes there’s a Lorenz motor out there in someone else’s shed that would allow them to restore the whole apparatus to working order. If you see something in your attic that looks like a motor in smooth black capsule-like casing with shafts on both sides manufactured by the Lorenz Company at Tempelhof in Berlin, please contact the National Museum of Computing.

Looters dig up Petersburg National Battlefield

Just in time for Memorial Day, the National Park Service has discovered extensive looting of the Petersburg National Battlefield in Virginia. Rangers found a large number of pits dug by treasure hunters looking to steal Civil War artifacts. They likely used metal detectors to discover small, easily removed and carried objects like uniform buttons, buckles and bullets.

These excavation pits were discovered by park staff last week. That area has now been sealed off as an active crime scene while the rest of the park remains open to visitors who, unlike the looters, have respect for thousands of Union and Confederate troops who were killed and wounded in the Siege of Petersburg.

Since the park is nestled in an urban setting, Rogers said, “Someone may have seen something we need to know. The public can help by calling in any tips or other information. The toll-free number is 888-653-0009 and callers can leave a message.”

The looting at Petersburg National Battlefield is a federal crime covered by the Archeological Resources Protection Act of 1979. Violators, upon conviction, can be fined up to $20,000.00 or imprisoned for two years, or both.

Unfortunately it will be difficult to recover any looted artifacts. The kinds of things likely to have been found would be next to impossible to trace specifically to the Petersburg battlefield as opposed to the Civil War period in general.

Petersburg is where the battles that finally ended the Civil War took place, and much like the war itself, it took far longer and claimed more casualties than anyone expected. The longest siege in US history began in June of 1864 after General Ulysses S. Grant put a stop to six weeks of failed frontal assaults on Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s army defending Richmond and withdrew to Petersburg. Then the second largest city in Virginia, Petersburg was a railroad hub and an essential supply line to Richmond.

The Union army failed to take Petersburg thanks to its leaders’ usual lack of coordination and failure to immediately press hard-won advantages, so they settled in for the long haul, digging trenches that would ultimately cover 30 miles of ground from the outskirts of Richmond to the outskirts of Petersburg. The subsequent siege lasted nine and a half months and saw a dozen major engagements between the Union and Confederate armies. With soldiers digging ever-growing networks of trenches, long periods of inaction peppered with battles that achieved few tactical goals at a great cost of human life, Petersburg presaged the approach that would characterize the First World War.

The Third Battle of Petersburg on April 2, 1865, was the last battle of the siege. The Union victory forced General Lee to evacuate Petersburg and Richmond. The city of Richmond surrendered on April 3rd. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, mortally wounded by exhaustion, disease, hunger and desertion, fought on for another week until it was defeated at the Battle of Appomattox Court House and Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant on April 9th, 1865. That triggered the surrender of the rest of the surviving Confederate forces and the end of the American Civil War.

Ancient gold wreath kept in a box under the bed

On June 9th, Duke’s of Dorchester auction house will be selling an ancient gold myrtle wreath kept for years in a box under a bed in Somerset. Duke’s appraiser Guy Schwinge went to the cottage to examine some of the belongings of the elderly resident. He was amazed when the owner pulled a busted old cardboard box out from under the bed, dug through the crumpled up newspaper and fished out a Hellenistic gold wreath. It’s a hoop of pure gold with gold myrtle leaves and flowers attached that obscure the hoop and give it the look of a natural myrtle wreath when seen from the front. The workmanship is very fine, with delicate veining on the leaves and details like the anthers and filaments of the flowers.

The style suggests it dates to around the 2nd or 3rd century B.C., but its exact age can’t be determined.

“It is notoriously difficult to date gold wreaths of this type. Stylistically it belongs to a rarefied group of wreaths dateable to the Hellenistic period and the form may indicate that it was made in Northern Greece,” [said Guy Schwinge].

“It is eight inches across and weighs about 100 grams. It’s pure gold and handmade, it would have been hammered out by a goldsmith.

“The wreath is in very nice condition for something that’s 2,300 years old. It’s a very rare antiquity to find, they don’t turn up often. I’ve never seen one in my career before.”

I’ve never seen an ancient Hellenistic gold wreath with those hoops at the end of the circlet before. The current owner, who prefers to remain anonymous, inherited the piece from his grandfather. He doesn’t know anything about it. He is quoted in the article saying that his grandfather traveled extensively in the 1940s and 1950s, including in northwest Greece near the border, but the Duke’s auction catalogue says it was acquired by the seller’s grandfather in the 1930s.

It’s all a bit shady, especially since according to the article there are still bits of dirt embedded in the wreath. Dirt suggests recent excavation, not something that was bought legitimately 60, 70 or even 80 years ago. Gold wreaths are expensive, small and portable which makes them highly desirable to looters. In 2006 the Getty had to return one they had bought in 1993 from a “Swiss private collection,” ie, a gang of Greek smugglers, to Greece. In 2012 traffickers were caught red-handed trying the sell a looted gold wreath in Greece. On the other hand, there are plenty of nooks and crannies in the hammered sheet gold for dirt to nestle in for the long haul. If it was never professionally cleaned, it’s possible that some of the soil from its burial place stuck over decades.

It almost certainly was deliberately buried as a funerary offering. Wreaths of braided flowers, grasses, leaves and branches were used in ancient Greece and Rome as symbols of victory, honor and sovereignty crowning the heads of Olympic athletes, generals on the battlefield, even literary giants like Ovid and Virgil. Wreaths also symbolized the ascension to immortality or apotheosis, often seen in funerary monuments held over the head of a deified emperor, for example.

Myrtle, along with laurel, palm, oak, olive, grape vines and ivy, were popular wreath motifs. The myrtle was associated with the goddess Aphrodite, symbolizing love and immortality. Myrtle wreaths were worn at weddings, by victorious athletes and by initiates into the Eleusinian mysteries. In Rome, the Corona Ovalis was given to a military commander determined by the Senate to be worthy of an ovation (a ceremony a step short of a triumph) for a victory realized without bloodshed.

Gold versions of the wreaths during the Hellenstic period were placed in graves as funerary offerings for the honored dead or dedicated to the gods in sanctuaries. They were too fragile for use as crowns or diadems in life. They are best known from the graves of Macedonian rulers — a gold myrtle wreath believed to have beloned to Meda, fifth wife of Philip II of Macedon, was found in the royal tombs at Vergina — but Hellenistic gold wreaths have been found as far afield as southern Italy and the Dardanelles.

The articles about the Somerset wreath say it could sell for as much as £100,000 ($146,000), but Duke’s is far more circumspect. The pre-sale estimate is £10,000-20,000 ($14,600-29,000).

The Father of Quality Lager reborn

Humans have been brewing beer since at least 6000 B.C. in Mesopotamia — a study was just published a few days ago revealing a 5,000-year-old recipe for beer derived from residue inside pottery found in China’s Shaanxi province — but for thousands of years the chemical processes of fermentation were mysterious. Ingredients varied widely, and even when stripped to the bare bones, as with Bavaria’s 1516 beer purity law, the Reinheitsgebot, which stipulated that beer could only be made from water, hops and malted barley, things could still go horribly wrong. Some barrels from the same brew could go bad. This bad beer or “beer sickness” made the beverage undrinkable, or drinkable only at a great cost in intestinal discomfort.

It was only in the late 19th century that a cure was found for beer sickness. Mycologist Dr. Emil Christian Hansen, who in addition to being a veritable paragon of human determination is pretty much directly responsible for every healthy sip of lager you’ve ever had. Hansen was born in Ribe, Denmark, in 1842, the son of a hardworking laundress and an alcoholic Foreign Legion vet who lived on the streets a homeless drifter. To help support the family, from an early age Hansen took on all kinds of jobs, from acting to house painting. When he got a steady job as a tutor, he was finally able to support his formal schooling. He graduated high school at the age of 29 and matriculated at the University of Copenhagen where he studied zoology with a particular interest in fungi.

(Random historical connection interlude: when he was a student at the University of Copenhagen, Hansen was the assistant of Professor of Zoology Japetus Steenstrup. Steenstrup, also head of the university-affiliated Royal Natural History Museum, in 1850 loaned Charles Darwin some modern and fossil barnacle specimens from his personal collection to aid Darwin in his research for On the Origin of Species. Four years later Darwin expressed his gratitude by gifting Steenstrup with 77 barnacle fossils, 55 of which were discovered in storage and put on display at the Natural History Museum in 2014. In 1876, Hasen would co-author the first Danish language translation of Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle.)

In 1877, Emil Hansen got a job at Copenhagen’s Carlsberg Brewery reserching “organisms in beer.” The Carlsberg Laboratory had opened in 1875, the brainchild of brewery founder Jacob Christian Jacobsen, its mission advancing knowledge of biochemistry and brewery science. Just two years later, Hansen was head of the laboratory. In 1883, he made a momentous breakthrough while studying yeast. He realized bad beer wasn’t caused solely by bacterial contamination, as Louis Pasteur had proposed, but also by contamination from wild yeast strains. He isolated a single cell of favorable yeast and grew it into a pure yeast culture he called “Unterhefe Nr. I” (bottom-fermenting yeast no. 1) which when used as the sole yeast source in the fermentation process ensured that the microorganisms which caused beer sickness would not develop in the lager.

Carlsberg yeast no. 1 went into production in November 1883. Jacobsen was a philanthropic, progressive-minded man who was deeply committed not just to enlisting science to produce excellent beer, but to supporting scientific endeavors for the betterment of mankind in general. Jacobsen could have easily patented the “clean yeast” isolated in his laboratory, but instead he spread the purified yeast culture far and wide, reaching out to competitors and offering them living yeast specimens free of charge. Thus Carlsberg ended lager’s beer sickness problem and lager began its reign as the most popular beer in the world, today comprising 90% of all beer sold. Most of the lager produced today uses the same strain isolated by Hansen and distributed by Jacobsen.

Three years ago during construction outside the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen, three bottles of beer, still corked and in remarkably good condition, late 19th century labels and all, were discovered in a forgotten cellar. Researchers at the lab uncorked one and sipped the contents. It was still good, apparently, although it no longer tasted like lager so much as a sherry or port. Carlsberg Laboratory scientists then took samples from the bottle in an attempt to isolate the original live brewing yeast that revolutionized lager production worldwide. Nobody thought they’d be successful, but against all predictions, after a year of research they succeeded, thanks to the thick layer of precipitate at the bottom of the bottle which was characteristic of late 19th century lager.

With a living culture of the original Unterhefe Nr. I, Carlsberg’s brewers set to the challenging task of recreating the first consistent quality lager. While the brewery has exceptional archives and even a museum, there is no exact recipe for the 1883 lager. All they had to go on in the records was the ratio of water, malt and hops, because the brewers back then didn’t write down the detailed recipe. At the time the brewery really only made one type of beer, and brewers worked on multiple batches a day. They knew the recipe backwards and forwards, so they didn’t bother to document it in writing.

The ratio was a solid starting point, though, and they did know a great deal about the sources of ingredients and the equipment used. They acquired floor-malted barley malt (floor malting was the system used in 1883). They secured well water drawn through the chalk layer that underlays Copenhagen, just as the water from the 68-foot feep well that supplied the Carlsberg brewery in 1883 was. They used “Gammel Dansk” barley, one of the first domestic barleys J.C. Jacobsen considered of high enough quality to use instead of importing Scottish and British varieties. Like the 1883 brew, the rebrew was not filtered or pasteurized, nor was gelatin added to clear the brew of hazy sediment.

Because perfectionism is the name of the game, the brewers called in glassblower Peer Nielsen from the Holmegaard glassworks, the oldest in Denmark founded in 1825. Holmegaard has been making Carlsberg bottles since the 1850s. Nielsen consulted with Carlsberg museum staff and glass collectors to determine what kind of bottle would have been used in 1883. He found that machine moulded glass bottles were only produced starting in the 1890s, so he used a wooden mould and to mouth-blow the green glass bottles just as his vocational ancestors had done.

On May 18th, the press, craft beer producers, connoisseurs and critics were invited the first tasting of the rebrew, named the Father of Quality Lager.

“I’m relieved,” Bjarke Bundgaard, a beer history expert for Carlsberg, told Live Science after the cask was tapped. “We were very afraid of unwanted microorganisms visiting in the barrel. But basically the beer fulfills what I would expect: rich, malty, higher levels of residual sugars. I think it’s quite authentic, so I’m satisfied.”

The lager was darker in color, sweeter and less fizzy than the familiar green-bottled Carlsberg pilsner of today, and it had 5.7 percent alcohol content (just short of their goal of 5.8 percent). Bundgaard said the historic lager was not as flavorful as the craft beers of today because “this was an everyday-life beer —it was something that people were drinking for lunch or even for their breakfast.”

Only around 30 bottles of the rebrew were made and there are no plans for retail production, but Carlsberg will be holding beer tasting events around the world. Enter your name and email here to be notified should there be one in your neck of the woods.

Neanderthals built stalagmite circles 175,000 years ago

The entrance to the Bruniquel Cave in southwest France collapsed in prehistoric times, sealing off the cave from the Pleistocene until determined local speleologists dug their way through in 1990. Inside the cave just 336 meters (1102 feet) from the entrance, they found two circular structures made of whole and broken stalagmites. Archaeologists carefully documented the site, but were unable to date it. Accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dating on a burnt animal bone found nearby returned a date of older than 47,600 years ago, which pushes the outer limit of C-14 dating’s 50,000-year range. The date dangled the intriguing possibility that the stalagmite circles had been built by Neanderthals, the only people in Europe from 400,000 to 40,000 years ago when anatomically modern humans moved in and rapidly took over.

Archaeological exploration of the site ended abruptly when the lead archaeologist F. Rouzaud died prematurely in 1999, and the difficult access to the cave kept other archaeologists from picking up where he left off. In 2013, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences palaeoclimatologist Sophie Verheyden, a speleologist who has a vacation home in the area, put together a team of experts to examine the annular stalagmites structures.

Verheyden’s team found two circular structures, the larger one 6.7 × 4.5 meters (22 x 15 feet), the smaller one 2.2 × 2.1 meters (7.2 x 6.9 feet). In the center of the larger circle are two stacks of stalagmites with two more accumulation structures outside of it. In total, about 400 stalagmite pieces were used in these structures, less than 5% of them whole. Half of them are from the middle section of the stalagmites. The ones used in the large circle have a mean length of 34.4 centimeters (13.5 inches); the ones in the smaller circle have a mean length of 29.5 cm (11.6 inches).

The annular geometry is too regular to be the product of random natural breakage, and relatively regular sizes of the stalagmites, larger in the larger circle and smaller in the smaller circle, are further evidence that this is deliberate construction. The possibility that they might have been cave bear nests is eliminated by the size and inner organization of the structures. Archaeologists also found prints left where some of the stalagmites were wrenched off the cave floor and traces of fire on all six structures, 57 reddened pieces and 66 blackened ones.

Uranium-series dating of stalagmite samples and the calcite regrowth covering the structures returned dates of 175,200 to 177,100 thousand years. The dates of all the samples fell into this range. The stalagmite structures are therefore among the oldest firmly dated human constructions, and Neanderthals were the only humans in Europe at that time.

The earliest surviving evidence of constructions by anatomically modern humans — collapsed circular structures made from mammoth bones or dear antlers — date to around 20,000 years ago. Indications of earlier Neanderthal building are limited to a few postholes and remnants of dry stone walls, but they cannot be conclusively attributed to Neanderthals or conclusively dated. The great archaeological gifts of the Bruniquel Cave, therefore, are the complexity and survival of the stalagmite circles and the repeatable, reliable direct dating.

This momentous find redefines our understanding of Neanderthal culture and abilities. From the research published in Nature, which you can read in its entirety here (pdf):

The attribution of the Bruniquel constructions to early Neanderthals is unprecedented in two ways. First, it reveals the appropriation of a deep karst space (including lighting) by a pre-modern human species. Second, it concerns elaborate constructions that have never been reported before, made with hundreds of partially calibrated, broken stalagmites (speleofacts) that appear to have been deliberately moved and placed in their current locations, along with the presence of several intentionally heated zones. Our results therefore suggest that the Neanderthal group responsible for these constructions had a level of social organization that was more complex than previously thought for this hominid species.

There’s a compilation of photographs and 3D animated flyover of the site in the video on this page. Alas, I cannot embed it because of cursed autoplay, but it’s well worth viewing.