During World War II Bletchley Park in England was the site of a secret British military intelligence operation set up to crack ciphers and codes used by Nazi Germany and the Axis Powers. Located 50 miles North-West of London (and conveniently on a railway line that connected the two great Universities of Oxford and Cambridge which supplied many of the brains behind this operation), against seemingly insurmountable odds the code breakers at Bletchley Park devised methods to allow them to successfully read enemy codes, often within a few hours of the messages being received by outlying stations. Among the ciphers that were broken here were Enigma and Lorenz. Research into automating the deciphering of messages led to the development of new technology and Colossus, the world’s first semi-programmable computer, was invented at Bletchley Park to aid the decoding of Lorenz ciphers, used by the German high command to send their most highly-classified and important communications.
With this theme in mind, we have scrambled the instructions at stage one using our ‘Enigma encoder’ - in order to view the instructions unscrambled you MUST have with you a similar device for decoding. Our ‘Enigma encoder’ was a piece of PVC tubing with an outer diameter of 1½” and about 15” long - any tube, dowel or rod will do, provided it has exactly the same outside diameter as our tube and at least 10” long. Having a couple of rubber bands that fits snugly around your ‘decoder’ will help, but are not absolutely necessary.
How you unscramble the instructions using your ‘decoder’ is part of the challenge, but it should be fairly intuitive and isn’t meant to be difficult because, after all, this is not quite Bletchley Park!