OBITUARY - Arnold Lynch

THE TIMES
February 01, 2005

OBITUARY - Arnold Lynch
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Engineer who made a crucial contribution to wartime codebreaking
AT THE Post Office Research Station in Dollis Hill, North London, from
1936 to 1974, Arnold Lynch specialised in the measurement of the
electrical and magnetic properties of materials. Both during and after the
war his work greatly assisted the drive towards miniaturisation of radio
and radar sets. It was also crucial to one of the most complicated
codebreaking sagas of the war  the cracking of the Fish code, an
exceptionally complex teleprinter cypher used by the German High Command.

Lynchs work on the development of an optical tape reader was essential to
the construction of the Colossus machine which was used to break Fish. The
Colossus has a serious claim, too, to be considered the first programmable
electronic computer.

Arnold Lynch was born in Tottenham, North London, in 1914. His father was
headmaster of West Green School and both parents were very active in the
Labour Party. He won a scholarship to Dame Alice Owens School in
Islington, before going up to Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Shortly after
graduating he entered the Post Office by competitive examination.

In 1943 he was studying photocells. Unknown to him, his boss at Dollis
Hill, Tommy Flowers, was working to develop a machine that would break
Fish  manual decoding was so slow that any coherent material it yielded
was already hopelessly out of date. Thanks in large part to Lynchs work on
optical tape readers, the Colossus could read punched tape at 5,000
characters per second, five times faster than previous designs.

After the war he continued to research dielectric loss. He felt it was a
great professional achievement when this work led to the choice of British
polyethylene in preference to American in the first transatlantic
telephone cable laid in the mid-1950s..../snip/


...One of his great interests was the history of technology, and he was a
member of the archives committee of the Institution of Electrical
Engineers for some 25 years. He took a great interest in the project,
begun in 1994, to rebuild Colossus at the Bletchley Park Museum.

He married Edith Taylor in 1953. She died last year, and he is survived by
a son and a daughter. Another daughter died in infancy.

Arnold Lynch, electrical engineer, was born on June 3, 1914. He died on
November 13, 2004, aged 90.


see :
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1464971,00.html