The Imitation Game Christopher soon dies from tuberculosis. When Britain declares war on Germany in 1939, Turing travels to Bletchley Park. Under the direction of Commander Alastair Denniston, he joins the cryptography team of Hugh Alexander, John Cairncross, Peter Hilton, Keith Furman and Charles Richards. The team are trying to decrypt the Enigma machine, which the Nazis use to send coded messages. Turing is difficult to work with, and considers his colleagues inferior; he works alone to design a machine to decipher Enigma. After Denniston refuses to fund construction of the machine, Turing writes to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who puts Turing in
Reflector (cipher machine) Reflector (cipher machine) A reflector, in cryptology, is a component of some rotor cipher machines, such as the Enigma machine, that sends electrical impulses that have reached it from the machine's rotors, back in reverse order through those rotors. The reflector simplified using the same machine setup for encryption and decryption, but it creates a weakness in the encryption: with a reflector the encrypted version of a given letter can never be that letter itself. That limitation aided World War II code breakers in cracking Enigma encryption. The comparable WW II U.S. cipher machine, SIGABA, did not include a reflector.