About the Archive

Contents of the digital archive

This website contains nearly 3,000 images of letters, photographs, newspaper articles, and unpublished papers by or about Alan Turing. The images were scanned from the collection of Turing papers held in the Archive Centre at King's College, Cambridge.

The images are within PDFs which can be viewed at the bottom of the relevant pages. Please note that some files are nearly 100 MB and make take some time to load. The PDFs can be made full-screen and there is capacity to zoom in.

These images are subject to copyright restrictions. Also, for copyright reasons it was not possible to put all the items from the Turing papers on this website. That is why sometimes an item is described on a webpage but does not appear on the PDF on that page. In addition there are some items that have come to the Turing Papers since the Turing Digital Archive was created in 2004 and they are not mentioned on this website; it is hoped that resources will permit their publication on the website in due course. However, the complete catalogue of all the items held (in paper copy) at King's is on-line. It includes details of how and when the papers came to be in the King's College archives. The catalogue was jointly created by the King's College team and by the National Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists. The Turing Trust has made many of the most important contributions to the Turing archive at King's College.

Updates to the digital archive

In 2022 the archive was renovated. Changes included re-ordering and re-orientation of images as necessary for natural reading order, and addition of pages that appeared to have been omitted from the previous website merely by oversight (e.g. AMT/B/22 pages 70-71, page 52 and the last 18 pages of AMT/B/25, and 6 pages scattered throughout AMT/B/32).

If you find pages that are difficult to read, apparently missing, out of order or orientated incorrectly please contact the archivist (see link below).

You can arrange to visit the Archive Centre in person if you would like to look at any of the original documents.

Sponsors

The Electronics and Computer Science department of the University of Southampton, the British Computer Society, Eslevier, and the Institution of Electrical Engineers funded the project, with much help from the King's College Archive Centre.

The Southampton team were: Prof Tony Hey, Prof Wendy Hall, Dr Kirk Martinez, Gareth Hughes, Dr Gary Wills, Mark Weal and Nick Lamb. The King's team were: Jacky Cox, Ros Moad and Dr Jonathan Swinton.

Contacts

The website is hosted at King's College, Cambridge, and maintained by the Archivist and Webmaster. Questions about the website and/or the archive papers can be directed to the Archivist (see link above).

Further reading

  • J. Copeland (ed.): The Essential Turing (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2004)
  • B.J. Copeland (ed.): Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine: The Master Codebreaker's Struggle to Build the Modern Computer (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2005)
  • Cora Diamond (ed.): Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics (Cambridge, 1939 and The Harvester Press: Hassocks, Sussex, 1976). This contains AMT's contributions to discussions.
  • Andrew Hodges: Alan Turing: the Enigma (Burnett Books Ltd.: London, 1983)
  • Andrew Hodges: Turing: A Natural Philosopher (The Great Philosophers Series, Phoenix: London, 1997)
  • Dermot Turing: Alan Turing: The Life of a Genius (Pitkin: Brimscombe Port, 2017)
  • Dermot Turing: Prof: Alan Turing decoded: A Biography (The History Press: Brimscombe Port, 2015)
  • Sara Turing: Alan M. Turing (Heffer: Cambridge, 1959).