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Turing’s legacy extends to his impact on the institutions where he worked. Manchester
University went on to build the first transistorized computer. The National Physical Laboratory’s
Division of Computer Science carried on doing groundbreaking research, most notably in com-
puter communications. ‘Packet switching’, a crucial enabling technology for the Internet, was
developed at the National Physical Laboratory in the 1960s by Donald Davies, one of Turing’s
assistants in the ACE days.
The Science Museum in London has the original NPL Pilot ACE computer on permanent
display: Davies and others at NPL developed this pilot model from Turing’s ambitious ACE
design (see Chapter 21). Turing himself visited the Science Museum in 1951 and was fascinated
by an electromechanical cybernetic ‘tortoise’ that he saw on display.^9 Designed by William Grey
Walter, the tortoise was a small autonomous robot that could sense its surroundings.^10 During
2012 and 2013 a special exhibition, ‘Codebreaker: Alan Turing’s Life and Legacy’ ran at the
Science Museum as part of the Turing centenary celebrations (Fig. 42.2): this featured the Pilot
ACE, an Enigma machine, and other Turing-related items, including the tortoise he had viewed
in 1951.^11 Chapter 38 contains some detective work about one of the codebreaking exhibits in
this exhibition.
The Turing centenary celebrations sparked numerous scientific articles about Turing’s work,
and indeed entire journal issues appeared focusing on his achievements. The leading scientific
periodical Nature pictured him on the front cover of a special centenary issue titled ‘Alan Turing
at 100’.^12
Cultural legacy
Turing’s life and early death have inspired numerous literary works and artworks. One of the
earliest plays about Turing, in 1986, was Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code. Starring Derek
Jacobi as Turing, the play premiered in London’s West End and then ran on Broadway during
1987–88. Ten years later it screened on BBC television, again starring Jacobi.^13 Jacobi played
Turing brilliantly on stage but by the time of the TV version he was a little old for the role, and
the BBC’s Turing seemed middle-aged and almost dull as he tore into Enigma at the age of 27.
More recently, Maria Elisabetta Marelli’s multimedia stage show Turing: A Staged Case History
was described by Barry Cooper in 2012 as ‘The most remarkable of the Turing Centenary
events’.^14 Snoo Wilson’s Lovesong of the Electric Bear opens with Turing being awoken from his
deathbed by his teddy-bear Porgy; and Catrin Fflur Huws’s To Kill a Machine revolves around a
gameshow called ‘Imitation’: her Turing sits beneath a tree-like structure with a poisoned apple
and a photograph of Christopher Morcom hanging over him.^15
Other plays about Turing include George Zarkadakis’s Turing and Rey Pamatmat’s Pure, both
focusing on Turing’s death and his relationship with his school friend Christopher Morcom.^16
Composer and Turing admirer James McCarthy says about Morcom:^17
Falling in love with Morcom changed Turing’s life. It would be an over-simplification to say that
Turing owed everything to that single event, but I believe that the desire to fulfil Morcom’s
potential for him and the later investigations into whether machines could think flow from this
pivotal moment.
Morcom was Turing’s only real friend at Sherborne, and this and similar claims about the
importance of his influence on Turing’s scientific life are often voiced; but in reality there is no