When Geoffrey Tandy was summoned to Bletchley Park in 1939, he had no idea what to expect. A volunteer at the Royal Navy Reserves, Tandy wanted to serve Britain however he could as World War II threatened his country’s existence. But as a cryptogamist for the National History Museum, Tandy wasn’t quite sure where he fit in. Cryptogamists studied algae, a skill that wasn’t in high demand when it came to military strategizing.
Tandy was greeted by representatives for the Ministry of Defence, who seemed excited at the prospect of Tandy joining the top-secret efforts at Bletchley—too excited, really, about someone whose expertise was in seaweed.
At some point, it occurred to Tandy that the Ministry may have made a mistake. The exact details are lost to history, but it became clear that someone had mistaken his job of cryptogamistfor a cryptogramist—a codebreaker, which is exactly what men like Alan Turing were doing at Bletchley. The mistake led to a moss specialist being deposited into one of the most intense covert operations of the war.
Generally useless to the group, Tandy did nothing for two years. Then something incredible happened.
In 1941, Allied forces torpedoed German U-boats and salvagedsome important documents from the wreckages, including papers that instructed users of the German Enigma Machine how to unscramble messages. The problem: The papers were waterlogged, damaged, and in dire need of quick restoration before they could be put to use.
The Ministry needed someone who was an expert in drying out water-damaged, fragile materials. Someone who may have had training in preserving algae in such a manner. They needed someone like Tandy.
Using absorbent materials gathered from a museum, Tandy dried the pages and returned them to legibility. The Bletchley codebreakers were able to use the information to crack German communication, allowing Allied forces to get a glimpse of their strategy. The deciphering likely hastened the end of the war by two to four years, saving millions of lives in the process.
Amazing. A legend.
Some days you’re a seaweed guy in the maths club, some days you’re THE Seaweed Guy in the maths club.
it’s jsut fucked up that we bred pigeons to be our companions and then when we no longer had use of them we just abandoned them and now we treate them like menaces and pests and people want them dead they are our FRIENDS
And, this is the library founder’s daughter, Louise Carpenter, (aka The Grey Lady), who haunts the library, b/c he left all his money to it.
The library has embraced her and installed ghostcams that you can watch, on their website. As a librarian who works in a 150 yr. old library myself, I find this totally fascinating.
Literally no trope emotionally fucks me up faster than “Character outlives their lover by many years and at the end of their life their lover comes to escort them from the world” like I only have to think about it hypothetically to start crying.
My dungeons and dragons character sacrificed himself to save the world and left his elven husband behind.
At the end of the elves life he was gathering water from a river and found the wedding ring my character was wearing when he jumped into the world soul. That night my character came and took him to the next life.
Their rings are now a magical item. You get 2+ to your armor and attack if you wear them both,or you are within 10 ft of another person wearing the other ring, or if you give one to someone else no matter how far you wander from each other you will always return to each other. The rings want to be together.
This might be the first time I’m using this pic unironically
