Hugo Alexander Koch (9 March 1870,
Delft
Delft () is a List of cities in the Netherlands by province, city and Municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality in the Provinces of the Netherlands, province of South Holland, Netherlands. It is located between Rotterdam, to the southeast, ...
– 3 March 1928,
Düsseldorf) was a Dutch inventor who conceived of and patented an idea for machine
encryption — the
rotor machine, although he was not the first to do so. He is sometimes erroneously credited as the originator of the
Enigma machine, although this has been shown to be the work of German engineer
Arthur Scherbius.
Koch filed for his rotor machine patent on 7 October 1919, and was granted
Netherlands patent 10,700 (equivalent to ), held by Naamloze Vennootschap Ingenieursbureau Securitas in
Amsterdam. No machine was built from his patents, and, in 1927, he assigned the rights to
Arthur Scherbius, the inventor of the Enigma machine. Scherbius had developed the idea of rotor machine encryption independently from Koch, and had filed for his own patent in 1918. Bauer (1999) writes that Scherbius bought Koch's patents "obviously not because he did not own patents before; presumably he wanted to protect his patents".
See also
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Edward Hebern Edward Hugh Hebern (April 23, 1869 – February 10, 1952) was an early inventor of rotor machines, devices for encryption.
Background
Edward Hugh Hebern was born in Streator, Illinois on April 23, 1869. His parents were Charles and Rosanna (Ro ...
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Arvid Damm
Arvid, Arved, Arnvid or Arvydas is a male given name, most common in Scandinavia but also in Iran and Lithuania. In Scandinavia it is derived from Old Norse and means "forest of eagles" or 'eagle wood'. Arvid is a royal male name that is composed ...
References
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Friedrich L Bauer
Friedrich Ludwig "Fritz" Bauer (10 June 1924 – 26 March 2015) was a German pioneer of computer science and professor at the Technical University of Munich.
Life
Bauer earned his Abitur in 1942 and served in the Wehrmacht during World War ...
, "An error in the history of rotor encryption devices", Cryptologia 23(3), July 1999, page 206.
*
David Kahn, The Codebreakers, 1967.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Koch, Hugo
1870 births
1928 deaths
20th-century Dutch inventors
Dutch cryptographers
People from Delft