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DAVID LEAVITT
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer
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Dedication
For Mark—friend, comrade, partner
PUBLISHED TITLES IN THE GREAT DISCOVERIES SERIES
David Foster Wallace
Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞
Sherwin B. Nuland
The Doctors’ Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignác Semmelweis
Michio Kaku
Einstein’s Cosmos: How Albert Einstein’s Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time
Barbara Goldsmith
Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie
Rebecca Goldstein
Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel
Madison Smartt Bell
Lavoisier in the Year One: The Birth of a New Science in an Age of Revolution
George Johnson
Miss Leavitt’s Stars: The Untold Story of the Forgotten Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe
David Leavitt
The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer
William T. Vollman
Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
David Quammen
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of his Theory of Evolution
FORTHCOMING TITLES
Richard Reeves on Rutherford and the Atom
Daniel Mendelsohn on Archimedes and the Science of the Ancient Greeks
General Editors: Edwin Barber and Jesse Cohen
Contents
1. The Man in the White Suit
2. Watching the Daisies Grow
3. The Universal Machine
4. God Is Slick
5. The Tender Peel
6. The Electronic Athlete
7. The Imitation Game
8. Pryce’s Buoy
Notes
Further Reading
Index
1
The Man in the White Suit
In Alexander Mackendrick’s 1951 Ealing comedy The Man in the White Suit, Alec Guinness plays Sidney Stratton, a dithery, even childlike chemist who creates a fabric that will never wear out or get dirty.
His invention is heralded as a great step forward—until the owners of the textile mills at which he was employed, along with the members of the unions representing his fellow workers, realize that it will put them all out of business. Soon enough, these perennial antagonists join forces to trap Stratton and destroy his fabric, which he is wearing in the form of a white suit. They chase him down, corner him, and seem about to murder him, when at the very last moment, the suit begins to disintegrate. Failure thus saves Stratton from the industry he threatens, and saves the industry from obsolescence.
It goes without saying that any parallel drawn between Sidney Stratton and Alan Turing—the English mathematician, inventor of the modern computer, and architect of the machine that broke the German Enigma code during World War II—must by necessity be inexact. For one thing, such a parallel demands that we view Stratton (especially as portrayed by the gay Guinness) as at the very least a protohomosexual figure, while interpreting his hounding as a metaphor for the more generalized persecution of homosexuals in England before the 1967 decriminalization of acts of “gross indecency” between adult men. This is obviously a reading of The Man in the White Suit that not all of its admirers will accept, and that more than a few will protest. To draw a parallel between Sidney Stratton and Alan Turing would also require us to ignore a crucial difference between the two scientists: while Stratton is hounded because of his discovery, Turing was hounded in spite of it. Far from the failure that is Stratton’s white suit, Turing’s machines—both hypothetical and real—not only initiated the age of the computer but played a crucial role in the Allied victory over Germany in World War II.
