Benjamin deForest Bayly

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Benjamin deForest Bayly (born  June 20, 1903 in London , Ontario , Canada , †  March 1994 in San Diego , California , USA ) was a Canadian engineer , professor and entrepreneur . During the Second World War he invented and developed the key machine Rockex , with the help of which the allied USA and Canada on one side of the Atlantic and the United Kingdom on the other side carried out their top-secret transatlantic communications in a bug-proof manner.

Life

Benjamin, mostly called " Pat " for short because of his Irish ancestors , was the only child of doctor Dr. Benjamin Moore Bayly and Alice de Foret Bayley were born. His mother came from the French-speaking Québec and had the French name de Forêt ( German  "vom Walde" ). For their son, the middle part of the name was Anglicized and deForest was born .

The young family moved to Moose Jaw in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan in 1906 . Pat went to school there. As a teenager he developed a special interest in the then new radio technology and became a radio amateur . In an official list from 1922, the name and callsign "4EC" of the then 19-year-old can be found. A year later he received his first law degree from the University of Saskatchewan . At this time he also met his future wife, Margaret Grant, who came from Hamiota in Manitoba . It encouraged him not to pursue jurisprudence any further and to pursue his actual calling instead. Pat then began an engineering degree at the University of Toronto , which he graduated in 1930. On May 19, 1932, he married Margaret. They didn't have any children. Pat became a professor at his university and taught there until 1940.

Meanwhile the Second World War had broken out in Europe and the beleaguered Great Britain was looking for allies across the Atlantic. On September 10, 1939 Canada entered the war against Germany on the side of the British , while the powerful USA pursued a policy of standing still for a long time and initially did not enter the war. The vital interest of the British and their Prime Minister Winston Churchill was to win the USA as a war allied. Therefore, he sent the Canadian-born master spy Sir William Stephenson (1897-1989), alias Intrepid ( German  "fearless" ), in 1940 to the USA to set up an espionage organization called the British Security Coordination (BSC) . The seat was the Rockefeller Center in New York . The purpose of the organization was to fertilize pro-British propaganda in the USA, to counteract pro-German propaganda and espionage at the same time and to neutralize them as much as possible, to set up an efficient news network and, above all, to persuade the USA to join the war on the British side.

Stephenson realized that an essential prerequisite for all of this was the establishment of a fast and tap-proof message exchange. For this task he placed Benjamin deForest Bayly in the service of his organization, where he appreciated his outstanding skills. It was also particularly advantageous that deForest Bayly, as a Canadian, was officially on the side of the British, while Americans could not (yet) work openly for the United Kingdom. DeForest Bayly was immediately sent to England, where he visited Bletchley Park and Whaddon Hall , met Stewart Menzies (1890–1968), head of the British foreign intelligence service (SIS) , and learned about the cryptanalytic methods of Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman with which the British, the encrypted German Enigma - radio messages successfully deciphered .

DeForest Bayly became deputy head of the BSC and was also an employee of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) , the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Camp X in Canada. He set up Hydra , the highly secret and equally securely encrypted transatlantic communications link. For this he developed a special key machine , called Rockex that the encryption of telex the cryptographically secure session key method ( English one-time pad , short OTP ) used. It was used to exchange strategically important messages between London, New York, Washington and Ottawa during the height of the war.

After the war he went back to his university and taught there until 1951. On December 11, 1954, he was elected mayor of Ajax , a community that was newly founded during the war on the north bank of Lake Ontario . He was very committed to urban development, became an entrepreneur there and founded Bayly Engineering .

He retired in 1969 and moved with his wife to Solana Beach, near San Diego, California. She died in 1986. Benjamin deForest Bayly outlived his wife by eight years. He was 90 years old.

literature

  • William A. Parish: The Life and Times of Benjamin deForest (Pat) Bayly 1903-1994 , Ajax , Ontario, 2010. PDF; 412 kB (English), accessed July 12, 2017.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ William A. Parish: The Life and Times of Benjamin deForest (Pat) Bayly 1903–1994 , Ajax, Ontario, 2010, p. 2. PDF; 412 kB (English), accessed on July 12, 2017.
  2. ↑ William A. Parish: The Life and Times of Benjamin deForest (Pat) Bayly 1903-1994 , Ajax, Ontario, 2010, p. 14. PDF; 412 kB (English), accessed on July 12, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME deForest Bayly, Benjamin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian engineer
DATE OF BIRTH June 20, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH March 1994
Place of death San Diego