June 7, 1954: The Death of Alan Turing

June 7, 1954: Alan Turing dies in Wilmslow, Cheshire, England. He was just short of his 42nd birthday.

Alan Mathison Turing was born on June 23, 1912 in Maida Vale, West London. While (or, since we're talking about Britain, I should say, "Whilst") he was a fellow at Cambridge University, he published a proof demonstrating that some purely mathematical yes–no questions can never be answered by computation. He defined a "Turing machine," and proved that the halting problem for such machines is undecidable.

During World War II, he worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, Britain's codebreaking center. He devised techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including a machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. He played a crucial role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Axis Powers in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic.

While at Bletchley Park, one of his fellow codebreakers was Joan Clarke. They were engaged to be married, but he admitted to her that he was homosexual, and the engagement was broken. She later married another man, although she didn't have children.

After The War, Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the Automatic Computing Engine, one of the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948, he joined Max Newman's Computing Machine Laboratory at the Victoria University of Manchester.

But in 1952, he was prosecuted for homosexual acts, then still illegal in Britain. He pleaded guilty, and accepted hormone treatment with a procedure commonly referred to as "chemical castration," as an alternative to prison. Although he kept his teaching job, he lost his security clearance, meaning he could never work for the British government again. He was also denied entry into the United States because of his conviction.

On June 8, 1954, Turing's housekeeper found him dead, a half-eaten apple by his side. An autopsy showed he had died by cyanide poisoning, possibly with the cyanide injected into the apple, although it was never tested. An alternative theory has been suggested, that of accidental inhalation of cyanide fumes.

In 2009, on behalf of the government that had prosecuted him, Prime Minister Gordon Brown officially apologized for the prosecution of Turing, not that he was able to hear it himself. In 2013, following a recommendation from Parliament, Queen Elizabeth II granted him a posthumous pardon. In 2019, a BBC audience voted him the greatest person of the 20th Century, ahead of the Queen and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. And in 2021, the Bank of England put him on the £50 note.

In the year following his death, 1955, Steve Jobs would be born on February 24, Tim Berners-Lee on June 8, and Bill Gates on October 28. It is impossible to imagine the computer revolution of the mid-1970s onward without them. But, as Isaac Newton would have put it, they stood on the shoulders of giants, one of whom was Alan Turing.

When Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web in 1989, Turing would have been 77 years old. He should still have been alive to see it.

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June 7, 1954 was a Monday. These 4 baseball games were played:

* The New York Giants beat the Milwaukee Braves, 4-2 at Milwaukee County Stadium. Willie Mays went 0-for-4. Rookie Hank Aaron appeared as a pinch-hitter, and grounded out. No one knew it yet, but these 2 men, 23 and 20 years old, respectively, would combine for 7,064 hits, 1,415 of them being home runs. Aaron would become the 1st player with 3,000 hits and 500 of them being home runs. He beat Mays to this achievement by 47 days.

* The Brooklyn Dodgers beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 4-3 at the original Busch Stadium (formerly Sportsman's Park) in St. Louis. The Dodgers won it in the top of the 12th inning on a steal of home plate. Not by Jackie Robinson, as you might expect, but by the short, chunky Roy Campanella. Campy and Duke Snider both his home runs. Robinson did go 1-for-4 with a walk. Stan Musial and Wally Moon homered for the Cards.

* And the Boston Red Sox swept a doubleheader from the Detroit Tigers, 3-2 and 5-4 at Fenway Park in Boston. Milt Bolling singled Harry Agganis home to win the nightcap in the 12th inning. Ted Williams did not play in either game, while rookie Al Kaline went 2-for-9 with an RBI.