TheCodeBreakers
lit bulbs to indicate plain- or ciphertext letters. To the army machine he
added a printing mechanism. The whole apparatus weighed 37 pounds,
operated at 200 characters a minute, and could be carried inside a case
about the size of an attaché case.
This was the most compact printing cipher machine available in 1934,
when the French general staff asked Hagelin for the impossible: a pocket-
sized cipher machine that would print the ciphertext and so permit one-
man operation. He first whittled a piece of wood that would fit into a
pocket to mark the limits of his dimension. While trying to concoct a
mechanism that would fit inside such space and also produce an
effective cipher, he bethought himself one day of a construction that he
had conceived three years before for the inventors of a vending machine.
It was an adding device that would accept different amounts of money,
and it consisted of bars arranged in a cylindrical cage with lugs
projecting from them in rows
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