Arthur Scherbius

Arthur Scherbius (1878 to 1929) was a German electrical engineer, born in Frankfurt am Main, who is best known as the inventor of the Enigma cipher machine. He studied mechanical and electrical engineering at the Leibniz University Hannover and the Technical University of Munich, took his Diplom-Ingenieur in 1903 and earned a doctorate in engineering in 1904 with a thesis on an indirect-acting water turbine governor. Working first as a project engineer and then on his own account from 1905, he patented circuits for controlling induction motors; the Scherbius circuit, a cascade of three-phase and commutator motors for low-loss speed control, was licensed to Brown, Boveri and Cie and to General Electric and used widely in rolling mills, mines and pumping plants. On 23 February 1918 he filed a patent for a cipher machine built on rotating wired wheels, the rotor principle behind Enigma, and in 1923 his rights passed to Chiffriermaschinen AG in Berlin, which marketed the machine under the Enigma name. He died in 1929 after a carriage accident in Wannsee, before the military use of his invention became widespread.