this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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Explanation: Alan Turing was a mathematician and computer scientist whose revolutionary work during WW2 helped the British shorten the war considerably by breaking (and thus having access to) Nazi coded messages.
A little over half a decade after the war, a chance break-in at his house led to him accidentally incriminating himself - by admitting to the presence of his boyfriend. This being the 1950s UK, the courts gave him a choice for the horrific crime of homosexuality - chemical castration, or several months in prison. Turing considered that he would not last in prison, and opted for the chemical treatment. Some time later, he bit into an apple laced with cyanide and died, which many consider to be an act of suicide (though it is still disputed, some believe it was genuinely an accident).
How do you "accidentally" lace an apple with cyanide? Was that just a common thing they had lying around back then, like plutonium in 1985?
He was using a series of chemicals, including cyanide to make electronics with deposited gold. He was not proficient at it and colleagues noted he was experimenting and he frequently made mistakes.
Don't all apples have cyanide by default?
Not enough of it to kill you!
Haven't you heard "An apple a day is my mithridatism that keeps my assassin away"?
Only if you get them from dubious old ladies knocking at your door.
Jokes aside. The kernels contain a small and harmless amount of cyanides.
Peach pits
In the 1950s Ultra (the code name for the massive British project that regularly decrypted German radio communications) was still a state secret. The reasons for maintaining this secrecy long after the end of the war aren't fully known, but German encryption devices (of which Enigma was one) had been sold to many countries around the world and Britain probably wanted to preserve the possibility of reading their secret communications if necessary (the machines used for this had been destroyed and the personnel disbursed, so this wasn't something Britain was still doing at this point).
So it would not have been possible for anyone to weigh in on Turing's behalf and publicly point out how instrumental he had been in helping to win the war. But surely someone like Churchill (who was still alive) could have interceded behind the scenes. Truly shameful that nobody did.
Tommy Flowers built colossus Turing made rules for programming it and yet flowers is basically unknown and Turing is known for flowers work and being discriminated against.
Flowers literally threw his chosen career away for the benefit of society and we still don't recognize him in a meaningful way.
Hell, look at how many people died or were crippled for life fighting fascism, and we honor their supreme sacrifice ... by bringing back fucking fascism.