How did the Enigma Machine work?

Jared, the only thing more incredible than Enigma was the amazing description of every part that you did. This was by far the most clear explanation I ever saw, thank you very much for doing it.

What an amazingly well-done explanation of something that is rather complex. I now understand why it was such a hard code to crack. Keep up the great work!!

I've read several books about the enigma machine, watched a documentary, and even looked at schematics of one, and never had everything fall in place like it has after watching this video. Thanks so much for this amazingly detailed breakdown of such an iconic piece of history!

One has only to admire the ingenuity of the German engineers who designed and built the Enigma machine. I knew it was complex, but not "that" complex. Also, you must be thanked and praised by your animation and explanation. Very detailed, clear and beautiful. I wonder how many person-hours you spent in designing the animation. Very nice work. I'll definitely show this to my Computer Engineering students.

You've cleared up 30 years of confusion in 20 minutes. Just, wow.

Don't know what I'm more impressed with- the Enigma machine, the people who cracked it, or this guy who made this animation...

This is an amazing visualizing video about encryption and decryption problem, and it also shows it doesn't matter how many steps of encryption you have, it's never gonna be completely undecryptable. The fact that we need at least two participants for communication who has to configure their common encryption method is always gives the chance to third party participants during the configuration to access the key for each code.

Great 3d modeling, you explained it perfectly. Enigma is a marvel of engineering. Also respect for Alan Turing.

Back in college, my best friend asked me to assist her on her final project for her cryptography class. While half her class did papers or presentations on crypto-currency, She, myself and another class mate got together and built an eigma machine from scratch. It didn't look anything like the real thing. We used cardboard rotors with fastener pin contacts and a few scattered lego pieces. You had to manually rotate each rotor for every input, the whole thing was a mess of wires and looked like trash. But it worked. We got the cryptography right. The mess of parts that looked more like a middle school art project than an electro-mechanical computer successfully scrambled messages and decoded them. In the end we got an A- on the project because it was only 90% finished, but we proved to the professor we understood the process and mechanics and this was his favorite project of all of them. In hindsight, I wish we had gotten a group photo with the thing.

I can only imagine how long it would have taken to animate this! Let alone all the research. Great work, very well explained

Used a machine similar to this when I was in the military. It takes an exacting acquired knack to operate. Results are quite impressive even today.

I've NEVER commented on a YouTube video before. But this was absolutely fantastic. I've read many online descriptions of how the Enigma worked, but for visual people, this was perfect. Really amazing. Thank you very much for creating this!

As a senior software engineer, I find it amazing how such a simple machine could generate such complicated to solve "puzzles". Would you be able to also cover the machine that broke its encryption? Turing's machine developed at Bletchley Park

I had an embedded systems course last semester, and we had to program the enigma using assembly language. But the first step was to really understand how the enigma worked. I owe it all to this video.

내 10년 동안 온갖 영상 보면서도 이니그마 작동 원리를 제대로 이해 못 했는데, 이 영상 보고 마침내 제대로 이해했습니다. 정말 감사합니다.

ここまでのシステム構築と解読にたどり着き、かつ、具体的に映像化してくれたことに感謝！

The sheer genius of the minds that came up with this is just incomprehensible to me, as is the utter brilliance of the people that managed to design a machine to crack it.

I was a radio operator in the Army for a short spell. We'd use code books with different call signs for message encrypting and the codes changed every day. Never failed though... some private would forget the codes (or lost the book) and screw up all the messages. That's when we busted out the Radio Shack walkie talkies and talk in plain English. Real top-secret stuff there!

This makes it look simple. The most interesting part to me is how the key switches are used for sending letters and lighting up the encoded letter just by moving the middle conductor, which acts as its own return spring

WOW - understood that very easily - but to create that machine is pure genius - well done Jared - you're very good with your voice to explain things like this - I'll share this with my friends who are interested in such things