Edward
Well-Known Member
WWII Enigma Machine Found at Flea Market Sells for $51,000
The legendary coding machine was first unearthed by a mathematician with a careful eye who purchased it for roughly $114
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
JULY 13, 2017
WWII Enigma Machine Found at Flea Market Sells for $51,000
The legendary coding machine was first unearthed by a mathematician with a careful eye who purchased it for roughly $114
...a collector at a flea market in Bucharest, Romania, who found an intact German Enigma machine, the super-secret coding gadget used by Third Reich during World War II. After paying roughly $114 for the machine, Reuters reports that the cryptography machine sold at auction for roughly $51,620 to an anonymous online bidder earlier this week.
The seller was no ordinary thrift-store shopper. “It belonged to a mathematician who has spent most of his life decrypting codes,” Vlad Georgescu, relationship manager at Artmark, the auction house that sold the machine, tells Judith Vonberg at CNN. While the flea-market vendor thought the machine was a unique typewriter, the mathematician knew exactly what he was buying, and felt “compelled to purchase it.”
He didn’t sell the Enigma right away. Instead, Vonberg reports, he tinkered with the machine, cleaning it, fixing it and figuring out how it works. George Dvorsky at Gizmodo reports that the machine was produced in Berlin by manufacturers Heimsoeth & Rinke in 1941 and that the machine is functional and still in the original wooden box, both rarities.
..... Dvorsky reports about 20,000 of the machines were produced before and during WWII, but only about 50 are known to remain in museums with an unknown number held by private collectors. The flea-market machine is the more common three rotor Enigma I machine. According to Dvorsky, a rarer Enigma M4, with four rotors, sold for $365,000 in 2015. And just in June Christie’s in New York sold a four-rotor Enigma for a record $547,500.
