Arthur Scherbius

Scherbius was an electrical engineer with a doctorate and a string of inventions behind him when, in 1918, he patented a rotor cipher machine for the commercial market. From 1923 his company Chiffriermaschinen AG sold it as Enigma to banks and firms wanting to protect their telegrams — an expensive device that at first sold poorly.

It was only when the German military took the design over and modified it that Enigma spread by the hundred thousand. Scherbius never saw it: he died in May 1929 of injuries from a horse-carriage accident, years before the Poles broke his machine and long before Bletchley Park turned it into the most talked-about cipher of the Second World War. An inventor whose work became famous precisely because it could be broken.