Tommy Flowers

Tommy Flowers (22 December 1905 to 28 October 1998) was an English engineer who worked for the British General Post Office. During the Second World War he designed and built Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer, to help decipher encrypted German messages, doing the pioneering work at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill in Middlesex. He came from a working class background and studied electrical engineering through evening classes while apprenticed at the Royal Arsenal, and his expertise in electronics and telephone exchanges proved crucial to the machine, which used around 1,800 thermionic valves and became instrumental in breaking the German Lorenz cipher. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/