World 00 · study five
The cipher engine
Three rotors, a reflector and a plugboard — the machine on the page is a real Enigma model, split into its 26 keys and 26 lamps so every one can move. Type, and it enciphers for real — rotors I–II–III, reflector B, the same wiring the originals used.
Scroll to open it up · press any letter
Anatomy
Three rotors, one secret
Each rotor is a different scramble of the alphabet, and each turns at its own moment. The right one steps every letter; the middle waits for a notch, then steps twice in two presses — the anomaly that made the machine breakable.
The machine comes apart as you scroll — keys drifting forward, lamps rising, the lid peeling back — but not together: every part rides its own track at its own rate, so nothing arrives in lockstep.
The path
Through and back
A letter goes in at the plugboard, right to left through the rotors, hits the reflector, then returns left to right and out through the plugboard again — ten stops. Because the reflector pairs letters, the whole machine is its own inverse.
Which is also its flaw: no letter can ever encipher to itself. That single certainty is where the attacks began.
Type it
It encrypts
Your keyboard drives the machine. A key sinks, the wheel windows step one notch, a lamp lights.
Retyping the cipher from the same start returns the plain text
Colophon
Found, then made ours
The machine is “Enigma Machine” by ASHISH, CC BY 4.0 — 171 MB as published, 1.9 MB as served here, split offline into 52 animatable parts. The cipher, the motion and the drawing are ours, in code.
Rotor step 13.846° · plugboard pairs BJ · EK · CH · — draw calls.
The light register is not a fallback — it is the same machine as its plan drawing, drawn from numbers measured off the model itself.