Happy Bering and Wells Day to @apparitionism! I had this thought that even if they hadn’t met through the Warehouse, maybe they could have still hung out and talked about cool books and stuff.

Alan Mathison Turing was born on June 23, 1912. He is best known for the creation of the Turing Machine, his work in deciphering the Enigma code during World War II, and constructing one of the first digital computers. He is also considered the father of artificial intelligence, having invented the scale by which the intelligence of machines is measured.

Turing worked in Bletchley Park, the base of British code-breaking operations, during WWII. He was crucial in the efforts to decrypt the Axis cypher, and it is estimated that the information gained from breaking the code allowed the war to end several years earlier than it might have. Winston Churchill himself credited Turing with making the single largest contribution to the Allied victory.

After the war, Turing developed a few more code-breaking processes and later worked at the National Physical Laboratory and Manchester University on projects related to artificial intelligence and designing a computation device.

In 1952, he was arrested on charges of indecency after he admitted to a sexual relationship with another man. He opted to receive hormonal treatments to reduce his libido (also known as chemical castration) rather than go to prison. As homosexuals were believed to be susceptible to blackmail and threats to national security at this time, his clearance to work on further code-breaking projects was revoked.

In 1954, at the age of forty-one, Alan Turing was found dead of cyanide poisoning in his room. It is widely presumed that he committed suicide. Some believe that he was re-enacting a scene from one of his favorite fairy tales, Snow White: a half-eaten apple found beside his bed is theorized to be the way the poison was ingested.

Alan Turing was officially pardoned for his conviction of gross indecency by the in August 2014, sixty years after his death.