14 | 1 lIfE AND wORk
1953 Uses Ferranti Mark I to model biological growth.
Also uses the computer as a primitive word processor.
Organo-therapy ends.
Appointed to Readership in the Theory of Computing at Manchester.
Publishes ‘Chess’, describing his chess-playing program.
1954 Publishes his last paper ‘Solvable and unsolvable problems’.
Dies sometime on the night of Monday 7 June, at his home in Wilmslow. His
body is found the next day by his housekeeper Eliza Clayton. Post-mortem
shows death to be a result of cyanide poisoning (Fig. 1.6).At an inquest on 10 June the coroner returns a verdict of suicide.
Service and committal on 12 June at Woking Crematorium near Sara’s home
in Guildford.Turing left no note, and (going by the inquest transcripts) no evidence was presented to
the coroner to indicate that Turing intended suicide: the modern guideline is that a verdict of
suicide should not be recorded unless there is clear evidence, placing it beyond any reasonable
doubt that the person intended to take his or her own life.^6 At the inquest the coroner said, not
very plausibly:^7
In a man of his type, one never knows what his mental processes are going to do next.
The poisoned apple
One thing that almost everyone has heard about Alan Turing is that he bit into a poisoned apple.
Shortly after he died a story in the papers, reporting that a scientist working on an ‘electronic
brain’ had taken cyanide, presented the now familiar image of the bitten apple by the bedside:^8
On a table at the side of the bed was half an apple from the side of which several bites had been
taken.
An article in the Washington Post on the morning of what would have been Turing’s hun-
dredth birthday reiterated the usual claim that the Allied codebreaker had ‘committed suicide
by biting into an apple laced with cyanide’; and in 2014 a two-page article in the British Daily
Mail stated baldly that Turing ‘killed himself by eating an apple coated in cyanide’.^9
An apple was indeed found in Turing’s bedroom near his body. It was never tested for cya-
nide, however: the love of a good story filled in the part about the apple being poisoned. The