Tunny

Though Enigma gets all the glory, the German military worked on other cryptographic typewriters as well. They offered encryption and decryption, meaning that an operator could type in plain text and get encoded text out. They were built to handle large amounts of text at high speeds. An early version of these machines was called "Swordfish," and learning that, the Americans and the British began to give fish nicknames to various versions of the machine.

This is "Tunny," called that by the British after the fish the Americans called tuna. It is a Schlusselzusatz 40 (SZ40), which was made by the German company Lorenz and was used by the German Army for high-level communications, according to the NSA Museum. "It provided on-line encryption and decryption of messages and was capable of handling large volumes of traffic at high speed. The Tunny depended on wheels for its encryption/decryption, but unlike Enigma, it did not substitute letters, but instead encrypted elements of the electrically generated "Baudot Code" used in normal telegraphic transmissions."

Click here to read the related story on the National Cryptologic Museum, and click here to check out the entire Road Trip 2010 package.

August 6, 2010 4:00 AM PDT

Photo by: Daniel Terdiman/CNET

| Caption by: Daniel Terdiman