Field Trip!

Today Bob took leave, and we headed up to Ft. Meade, MD to visit the National Cryptologic Museum . This is a place we've been meaning to visit for a few years now, but it took our friends Krista and Matt being assigned up there temporarily to make us actually get up there! We drove up this morning and ate lunch with Krista and little Henry at Wendy's before we all headed over to the museum.

The museum is free, which is one thing that had originally caught our eye, LOL. When we walked in, the man at the front desk gave the boys a scavenger hunt to do through the museum. Nathan did his all by himself, while the one for Luke turned into more of a joint effort with everyone else, even Jonathan, helping to write on it.

The museum was very interesting. I've always thought cryptology was fascinating, and I would have liked to spend time there with no little kids, so that I could actually read all the descriptions!

The museum had things like signal flags and cipher disks from the Civil War, and they even had a French Cipher that may have been used by Thomas Jefferson! I thought the World War II section was the most interesting. I've always thought the story of the Navejo code-talkers was amazing, and I also have enjoyed reading about the German Enigma machine, along with the machine that broke that code, which was invented by a man at NCR in Dayton.

This museum actually has several of the German Enigma machines, plus the American Bombe machine invented to figure out what the rotor settings were on the Enigma for the coded messages the Nazis were sending. That is a big, complicated machine! Each Bombe could go through all the rotor combinations of one wheel (the Enigma could have as many as 4 wheels) in 20 minutes (something like over 456,000 possible combinations), and there would be as many as 121 I think running at one time, so that all intercepted messages could basically be deciphered in real time. I'm going to get some books out of the library on the subject of the Enigma and the Bombe because I just think that is such a neat story, and I'd like to understand better how it all worked, and how the man invented the Bombe. (That was one of the description plates I could only skim over, LOL.)

So all in all, a very educational day, and the added bonus was spending time with Krista and Henry. Henry, Anna, and Grace maybe did not retain as much of the actual information, LOL, but they did enjoy playing around with each other and making each other laugh!