device the Enigma machine.

And if the Allies were going to win

they were going to need to figure it out.

Fortunately, the Allies had an ultimate weapon

of their own Alan Turing.

Turing basically invented the modern computer,

and though he never set foot on a battlefield

he was instrumental in helping end World War II.

You think Turing would have been treated like a hero for his

achievement but he wasn't.

Today we're going to take a look at the heroic life

and tragic death of Alan Turing.

But before we get started, be sure to subscribe

to the Weird History channel.

And let us know in the comments below what

other famous unsung heroes you would like to hear about.

OK, let's crack the Enigma that was Alan Turing.

In the 1950s being homosexual in the United Kingdom

was worse than taboo.

It was illegal.

Despite knowing this Turing was fairly open

about his sexual orientation.

When he was 39 he started a relationship

with a 19-year-old drifter named Arnold Murray.

Murray then burgled Turing's house

who then reported it to the police.

His relationship emerged during the investigation

and Turing was arrested for gross indecency.

This indecency law had been on the books

for well over a century, and it was the same statute

that Oscar Wilde had been tried under in the 1980s.

Turing was convicted and given an option he could go to prison

or be put on a treatment of female hormones.

He chose the latter.

Turing had been instrumental in helping win World War II,

but when it came to his indecency conviction

no one cared.

In the eyes of his society at the time being gay outweighed

any of the good he had done.

While he avoided jail time he was put on probation

and had to start taking estrogen pills.

This was in effect chemical castration.

There were a lot of downsides to the hormone treatment.

Its goal was to make gay people straight,

but in reality it just made Turing grow breasts and become

impotent.

It could also act as a depressant.

Well, the imitation game shows Turing

as broken by his punishment, in reality he kept

working on various projects.

In a more general sense the severity of Turing's punishment

provides a window into 1950s Britain's mindset.

In 1952 the same year Turing was arrested,

a progressive tabloid at the time

published an article calling gay men among other things freaks,

and framing gay people as a problem

that something needed to be done about.

Turing put on a brave face but inside he was suffering.

Unable to be himself his thoughts

turned to ending his life.

Turing was found on June 8, 1954 by his housekeeper.

He had eaten half of an apple that was laced with cyanide.

The coroner ruled it a suicide.

And note, while there is an urban legend

that this event inspired the Apple

logo with a bite taken out, but that legend it's not true.

That being said, there may actually be more to the story.

Friends of Turing along with his mother

thought he might have accidentally taken

his own life.

They claimed he hadn't seemed depressed

in the days and weeks leading up to his death.

There was also the fact that he had

been experimenting with cyanide in a personal lobotomy

before he died.

They theorized that rather than having used the poison

to deliberately taint the apple ,

he may have accidentally gotten some on it.

But that's not the end of the story either.

There is yet another even more interesting theory.

Some think that the British government was still

concerned that he would be forced to leak secrets because

of his then well-known sexual orientation,

and that they poisoned him on purpose.

Sadly we may never know the truth

since he didn't leave a note.

After World War II was over, the Cold War started immediately.

Code breaking was still an important skill

and Turing was able to continue his work.

He was even paid the then huge sum of 5,000 pounds

a year to work for the government communications

headquarters or GCHQ.

His triumph was short lived however.

The US and UK were working closely when it came

to government intelligence.

And America also had a harsh view of homosexuality.

The US thought there was a chance that any homosexual man

could be honey trapped and extorted to share information

to prevent being outed.

When Turing was arrested he lost his security clearance,

effectively ending his ability to work as a code breaker.

It made him furious.

Turing knew he was gay from a young age.

We know this because he developed feelings for a friend

when he was in school.

The boy's name was Christopher and while they

were good friends, Turing's romantic feelings

were not reciprocated.

Turing later wrote that while his friend knew how he

felt he hated him showing it.

Nevertheless both were geeks and they bonded over stuff

like math and chemistry.

Christopher died very young and Turing was devastated.

When he started working at code breaking central at Bletchley

Park during World War II, Turing was pretty open

about his preferences.

Nonetheless at one point he actually

proposed to his good friend Joan Clarke.

They did a lot of fun things together like go on dates

and see movies, but she was still shocked

when he asked her to marry him.

She said yes but the next day they went for a walk,

and he admitted to her that he had homosexual tendencies.

She was concerned but didn't end the engagement,

that would happen later.

And it was Turing who broke it off.

If Turing was such a war hero why was he

treated so badly afterwards.

Part of it came down to the fact that he couldn't actually

tell anyone what he had achieved during the conflict.

Everyone who worked at Bletchley Park was sworn to secrecy.

They couldn't even discuss what they were doing

with their immediate families.

Some of them died still keeping the secret.

The truth about how much they had achieved

was only still emerging well into the 21st century.

This meant that when Turing was arrested

he couldn't tell the cops that he was the savior of England.

The guy who Winston Churchill had said

made the single biggest contribution to ending the war.

Instead, they just treated him like a perv.

It's hard not to believe his punishment would

have been less dire if he could have told

people what he had achieved.

Turing was still a graduate student

when he first changed history.

He was studying at Princeton and wrote

a paper called "On Computable Numbers, With An Application

To The Entscheidungs Problem."

Well, that might not sound like the most mind blowingly

interesting reading material ever, it arguably was.

It basically invented computer science as we know it.

The paper imagined a machine that

could solve as many problems as the human brain.

And the best part was it would be instructed

to do different things by putting those instructions

on paper tape.

Yeah, well he was still just a student

Turing invented software.

He's theoretical machine could be told to do anything,

whereas before a computer would be built just

to solve one kind of problem.

Turing's universal machine was a computer as we know it today.

Before World war II code breaking

was a strictly human affair.

The human brain was the most powerful computer in the world.

And it was thought that if people could make up

fiendish codes, other people should

be able to figure them out.

But then the Germans created the Enigma machine.

The Polish had managed to crack it's initial code

before the war even started, but then the Germans just

made it even more complicated.

Even with 12,000 people working three shifts around the clock

at the British Secret Code Deciphering Facility

at Bletchley Park, no one could break it.

That's where Turing and computers stepped in.

Turing was instrumental in creating a code breaking

machine called the Bombe.

By the end of the war the Bombe figured out everything

that the German Navy was saying.

This was huge.

Then General Dwight Eisenhower even said

that the work done by Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley

probably shorten the war by two years.

Turing and his computer had saved millions of lives.

In 1950 Turing came up with an important question,

can machines think?

This led to one of the greatest problems ever devised.

He wanted to see if computers would one day be

so smart they could actually trick people

into believing they were human.

It worked like this, someone would sit and ask questions

to two participants.

One would be a computer and one was a human,

but the questioner wouldn't know which was which.

After five minutes they would try

to determine which one was the human,

then another person would have a turn

at questioning and guessing.

If more than 30% of the time the questioners

guessed the computer was the human,

the machine would have passed the Turing test.

For a long time, it seemed like this would be impossible.

Then in 2014 a computer called Eugene

that was built to simulate a 13-year-old boy managed to fool

33% of the participants.

The Turing test had finally been passed

and Turing had helped prove machines

could be as smart as humans.

Turing was treated appallingly in his lifetime,

but at the very minimum some of it

was righted after he died, even if it took people a long time.

In 2009 there was an online petition

calling for an apology for how the British government had

treated Turing.

Then Prime Minister Gordon brown did offer one,

but many felt that it wasn't enough.

Almost 60 years after Turing took his own life

a royal pardon for his crime was granted by the queen.

That wasn't the end of the good that finally

came from Turing's tragic fate.

In 2017 the Turing law came into effect.

This automatically pardoned any men

who had been convicted of homosexual acts

but had died before the laws were changed.

Any man who was still alive could seek out and receive

a pardon for the same.

Once again it was Alan Turing to the rescue.

So what do you think?

How was Turing treated in his lifetime?

Let us know in the comments below.

And while you're at it, check out some of these other videos

from our Weird History.