# History fact check-What were you taught about Alan Turing? **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [March 25, 2025, 12:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/history-fact-check-what-were-you-taught-about-alan-turing/1016067 "2025-03-25T00:50:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 18\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Stanislaus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/stanislaus/32/3391_2.png) [@Stanislaus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stanislaus)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2025, 3:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/history-fact-check-what-were-you-taught-about-alan-turing/1016067/61 "2025-03-25T15:20:06Z")
It’s worse than that. The film does show the bigotry, and the rationale for excluding gay men from secret work is laid out. What then happens is that the writers entirely invent an episode which makes the point that those secret service bigots were right, gotta hand it to them, that Turing guy did betray his country because he was gay, fair play to the bigots. I mean what the fuck. ---
**Author:** ![JacobSwan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a6a055/32.png) [@JacobSwan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JacobSwan)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2025, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/history-fact-check-what-were-you-taught-about-alan-turing/1016067/62 "2025-03-25T15:44:02Z")
> [@JRDelirious](#): > > People tend to forget we used to live in that world. My father spent a few months in prison about 5 years before I was born. He’s not gay or even bi. He was just experimenting and exploring his sexuality like a lot of people did in the 60’s. But he was unlucky enough to get caught. Less than 30 years later I experimented in much the same way at Uni and it was perfectly legal and normal. The law hadn’t changed at that point, but opinion was changing. My dads employer kept his job open for him while he was inside. So they clearly didn’t view it as a vile or immoral crime. I’m kind of glad he wasn’t offered chemical castration as an option. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here! ---
**Author:** ![muldoonthief](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/muldoonthief/32/3188_2.png) [@muldoonthief](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/muldoonthief)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2025, 3:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/history-fact-check-what-were-you-taught-about-alan-turing/1016067/63 "2025-03-25T15:46:09Z")
Probably the first time I heard about him in school was in a freshman CS class in college, but I believe I had heard of the Turing Test before that. I didn’t know he was gay until I read _The Cryptonomicon_ ---
**Author:** ![Odesio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/odesio/32/20003_2.png) [@Odesio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odesio)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2025, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/history-fact-check-what-were-you-taught-about-alan-turing/1016067/64 "2025-03-25T15:50:08Z")
I don’t recall learning a darn thing about Turing in high school. It’s possible his name was mentioned in one of our history books but he wouldn’t have been the answer to any test question. As a science fiction fan, I was familiar with the Turing Test and learned of Alan Turing through that. I’m still waiting to learn about the people who came up with the Voight-Kampff test. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2025, 3:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/history-fact-check-what-were-you-taught-about-alan-turing/1016067/65 "2025-03-25T15:59:08Z")
I graduated from High School in 1969, when we had one antiquated computer which ran machine language, so nothing there. I majored in Computer Science so I learned about Turing machines in college, and probably the Turing test when I took AI. I think I learned about the halting problem when we did Godel in college, but I don’t remember. When I got to grad school in 1973 I joined ACM and thus learned about the Turing Award, first given in 1966. Before the movie, sometime in the '90s, I saw “Breaking the Code” about Turing on Broadway starring Derek Jacobi as Turing. I was already working when “The Ultra Secret” came out, and I read it right away. From my research on writing a chapter on Encryption, Turing had a lot to do with the Bombe but little on Colossus. Some of the algorithms, but not the hardware. A for the situation in England, Arthur C. Clarke went to Sri Lanka not for the reefs but because he was petrified about being outed. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2025, 4:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/history-fact-check-what-were-you-taught-about-alan-turing/1016067/66 "2025-03-25T16:04:35Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > I graduated from High School in 1969, when we had one antiquated computer which ran machine language You had a computer in high school by 1969? You were way ahead of us. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2025, 8:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/history-fact-check-what-were-you-taught-about-alan-turing/1016067/67 "2025-03-25T20:32:51Z")
We were a large city school, 1500 people in my graduating class. Enough for a clunky old computer and one math class to learn it. But I forgot the other computer - a programmable calculator. Much faster. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2025, 9:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/history-fact-check-what-were-you-taught-about-alan-turing/1016067/68 "2025-03-25T21:58:56Z")
Ah, thanks to [@AndyL](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417/1667) for helping me remember: Greg Bear wrote a short story in 1989 called “Tangents”, where one of the main characters is clearly based on Turing, and he’s gay. So it was known to the public (or at least to Greg Bear) at least by then. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2025, 10:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/history-fact-check-what-were-you-taught-about-alan-turing/1016067/69 "2025-03-25T22:44:35Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > I do mention that he was gay, and suffered horrible persecution for it that led to his suicide Do we know for sure that he committed suicide? I have read things that suggested that his death may well have been accidental (he got sloppy and accidentally poisoned himself), or even that foul play may have been involved. But I don’t know whether or not there’s a current consensus. ---
**Author:** ![kenobi\_65](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kenobi_65/32/13178_2.png) [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2025, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/history-fact-check-what-were-you-taught-about-alan-turing/1016067/70 "2025-03-25T22:49:51Z")
I never heard of him, and he was never mentioned, in any of my classes in grade school or high school (which would have been in the 1970s and early 1980s). I’m not even sure that I recall hearing anything about him in college; at some point after that, I heard of the Turing Test, what it was meant to do, and that it was named after a computer scientist who came up with idea, but I knew nothing about Turing himself at that point. At some point in the last fifteen to twenty years, I finally learned more about who he was, his role in cracking Enigma, and in what he suffered through due to his homosexuality. By the time I saw _The Imitation Game_ in 2014, I was already familiar with Turing and his story. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2025, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/history-fact-check-what-were-you-taught-about-alan-turing/1016067/71 "2025-03-25T23:19:34Z")
Come to think of it, while I’m sure that I never heard of his orientation and persecution from high school classes, and I think probably not from college classes (I didn’t take any college CS classes abstract enough to talk about Turing machines, so he probably wouldn’t have come up), I obviously did hear about his orientation and persecution from somewhere, but I’m not sure where. Something I read, probably (I’ve always read a lot), but I can’t pin down what. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2025, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/history-fact-check-what-were-you-taught-about-alan-turing/1016067/72 "2025-03-25T23:24:32Z")
By “the big biography” I mean "[Alan Turing: The Enigma"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing:_The_Enigma) from 1983 ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2025, 4:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/history-fact-check-what-were-you-taught-about-alan-turing/1016067/73 "2025-03-26T04:30:44Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#): > > Do we know for sure that he committed suicide? I have read things that suggested that his death may well have been accidental (he got sloppy and accidentally poisoned himself), or even that foul play may have been involved. But I don’t know whether or not there’s a current consensus I was going to mention this. Its by no.means a consensus opinion but there are definitely some historians who doubt that Turing committed suicide. He was using cyanide in his experiments (and was not particularly rigorous in his safety.mesures) so the idea it was an accident is not crazy. Still IMO this is just historians being historians. There is not an established opinion, no matter how patently true, that some historian will not publish a revisionist tract claiming it’s false. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2025, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/history-fact-check-what-were-you-taught-about-alan-turing/1016067/74 "2025-03-26T14:51:24Z")
Wait, what experiments was he doing with cyanide? I’m not aware of any non-mathematical work he did. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2025, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/history-fact-check-what-were-you-taught-about-alan-turing/1016067/75 "2025-03-26T15:05:33Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Wait, what experiments was he doing with cyanide? I can’t find a cite or remember where I read it but I think it was part of his work in biology > **[The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chemical_Basis_of_Morphogenesis)** > > "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" is an article that the English mathematician Alan Turing wrote in 1952. It describes how patterns in nature, such as stripes and spirals, can arise naturally from a homogeneous, uniform state. The theory, which can be called a reaction–diffusion theory of morphogenesis, has become a basic model in theoretical biology. Such patterns have come to be known as Turing patterns. For example, it has been postulated that the protein VEGFC can form Turing patter Re... ---
**Author:** ![Magiver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4491bb/32.png) [@Magiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Magiver)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2025, 3:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/history-fact-check-what-were-you-taught-about-alan-turing/1016067/76 "2025-03-26T15:18:17Z")
> [@Whack-a-Mole](#): > > If you could point to one person who saved the most lives in WWII I am willing to bet it would be Alan Turing. And that was how he was treated. Joseph Desch was responsible for building a much faster version of the British Bombe decoding machine and his work was classified his whole life. It could decode a 3 rotor message in 50 seconds and a 4 rotor message in 20 minutes. ---
**Author:** ![Pixel\_Dent](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/bc8723/32.png) [@Pixel\_Dent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pixel_Dent)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2025, 3:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/history-fact-check-what-were-you-taught-about-alan-turing/1016067/77 "2025-03-26T15:22:50Z")
_Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid_ was assigned reading in one of my classes in high school so most of what I learned was from that. Mostly Turing machines, Turing test, halting problem, and the invention of round-the-house chess. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2025, 9:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/history-fact-check-what-were-you-taught-about-alan-turing/1016067/78 "2025-03-26T21:41:14Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Wait, what experiments was he doing with cyanide? > [@](#): > > …the police found a large quantity of cyanide in a small lab adjoining his bedroom. Turing called the lab ‘the nightmare room’. In it the police saw a pan full of bubbling liquid. The pan contained electrodes that were wired, via a transformer, to the light fitting in the centre of the ceiling. Turing was fond of messing about with electrolysis, and was pleased by his success at gold-plating a spoon (another spoon, not yet plated, was found in the room). Cyanide was part of the process. A one-pound glass jam jar (jelly jar) containing cyanide solution was found on a table near the electrolytic apparatus. A bottle of cyanide crystals was discovered in the top drawer of Turing’s chest of drawers. > > Cyanide-assisted electrolysis may seem a curious hobby, not to mention a hazardous one, but Turing liked making things for himself. When his chess set was stolen at Bletchley Park, he had carefully made new pieces out of clay, firing them in a tin over his open hearth. A week before Turing’s death, Robin Gandy stayed at Hollymeade. They played Turing’s ‘desert island game’ of trying to produce as wide a range of chemicals as possible by electrolysis, starting from common household substances. Even as a child, Turing had been fascinated by this idea, writing from Hazelhurst School about his chemistry experiments: ‘I always seem to want to make things from the thing that is commonest in nature and with the least waste of energy,’ he said. > > Copeland, B. Jack. Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age . Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition. -from a book which argues against the theory that Turing’s death was suicide. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/history-fact-check-what-were-you-taught-about-alan-turing/1016067.md?page=3)