According to IEEE Spectrum, a recently discovered cache of papers is revealing a lesser-known side of Alan Turing: his work as an electrical engineer. During World War II, Turing led a secret project called Delilah—a portable voice-encryption system designed to protect military communications. Unlike Bell Labs' room-size SIGSALY machine, Turing's prototype fit into three shoebox-sized units weighing just thirty-nine kilograms. The system worked by converting speech into digital numbers, adding an obscuring key, and transmitting the encrypted signal. In November twenty twenty-three, documents from the project—kept for sixty-six years by Turing's assistant Donald Bayley—sold at auction for nearly half a million dollars. The papers show Turing's hands-on engineering approach and include his lab notebooks and lectures to engineers, painting a picture of Turing not just as a theoretical genius, but as a practical inventor.

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