Tommy Flowers built the first computer, as a codebreaking device during the Second World War.
Flowers was a Londoner with a passion for electronics. Having gained his degree in electronic engineering he went to work for the Post Office. His dream was to try to convert Britain's mechanical telephone system into an electronic one, but opinion was against him.
During the Second World War he was drafted into Bletchley Park to join the ranks of mathematicians and cryptographers who were trying to crack Germany's code system.
He used his telephone experience to turn his fellow experts' ideas into an electronic codebreaking device named 'Colossus', which was in effect the first electronic computer. By the end of the war his team had built ten machines, each one improving on the one before.Most were dismantled afterwards and the plans destroyed for security reasons.
