Turing's forgotten voice scrambler

Hackaday points to a Popular Mechanics piece on Delilah, the portable speech-encryption system Alan Turing built late in WWII and then more or less vanished from the record. It was, in many ways, an early stab at digital voice encryption — secret, hand-built, and overshadowed by everything else with Turing’s name on it.

I have a soft spot for this one. The problem Turing was soldering his way through — how do you make a voice channel private without wrecking the voice — is the same problem that runs straight through to SRTP and secure signaling today. The tools changed; the question didn’t. There’s something grounding about seeing the lineage laid out: the modern stack isn’t a clean break from the past so much as the latest layer on a very old project.

Worth ten minutes if you like your crypto history with a maker’s bench in the frame.