{"id":192488,"date":"2025-06-17T19:42:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-17T19:42:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/192488\/"},"modified":"2025-06-17T19:42:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-17T19:42:10","slug":"wartime-codebreaker-alan-turings-scientific-papers-sell-for-465000-at-auction-alan-turing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/192488\/","title":{"rendered":"Wartime codebreaker Alan Turing\u2019s scientific papers sell for \u00a3465,000 at auction | Alan Turing"},"content":{"rendered":"

A cache of Alan Turing\u2019s most important scientific papers have been sold for \u00a3465,000 at auction, more than three times their expected sale price, after being saved from the shredder.<\/p>\n

It had been estimated<\/a> that the collection would sell for \u00a3150,000 in 13 separate lots but it fetched a total of \u00a3465,400 on Tuesday, which is understood to be a record for Turing material.<\/p>\n

The treasure trove of some of the wartime codebreaker\u2019s most important work was discovered gathering dust in a loft at a property in Bermondsey, south London. The archive was gifted to Turing\u2019s best friend but it was almost destroyed after being found during a house clearance last November.<\/p>\n

The papers were saved at the last minute when their significance was recognised at a family event and they went under the hammer in Etwall, Derbyshire<\/a>. It included a personally signed copy of his 1938 PhD dissertation, Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals, which sold for \u00a3110,500.<\/p>\n

Also featured was his 1936 paper On Computable Numbers, also known as Turing\u2019s proof, which introduced the world to the idea of a universal computing machine. Described as the first programming manual of the computer age, it sold for \u00a3208,000, according to auctioneers Hansons.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s founder, auctioneer Charles Hanson, said some of the items were among the \u201cmost important lots I\u2019ve sold in my time\u201d, adding: \u201cIt was a sale like no other, with lots like no other, a very memorable and special occasion which I was honoured to be a part of.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are iconic memories of an iconic man.\u201d<\/p>\n

The papers, known as offprints, had originally been given by Turing\u2019s mother, Ethel, to her son\u2019s friend and fellow mathematician Norman Routledge. They were produced in small numbers and distributed within academia, and rarely appear on the market.<\/p>\n

Routledge kept the collection of the codebreaker\u2019s offprints, which were eventually rescued by his nieces and nephews.<\/p>\n

Jim Spencer, the director of Rare Book Auctions, said: \u201cNothing could\u2019ve prepared me for what I was about to find in that carrier bag. These seemingly plain papers \u2013 perfectly preserved in the muted colours of their unadorned, academic wrappers \u2013 represent the foundations of computer science and modern digital computing.<\/p>\n

\u201cLiterature has always been my forte, not mathematics, so the past few months of intensively researching and cataloguing these papers has left me feeling that Alan Turing was superhuman.\u201d<\/p>\n

Turing was one of the codebreakers at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes who played a vital role in cracking the German Enigma code<\/a>, which was crucial to the allied victory in the second world war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A cache of Alan Turing\u2019s most important scientific papers have been sold for \u00a3465,000 at auction, more than…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":192489,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-192488","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-technology","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114700415473600545","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192488\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/192489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}