UK’s New £50 Note Featuring WWII Codebreaker Alan Turing Has Some Fun Details
Image via Bank of England
The Bank of England has unveiled a new £50 note spotlighting Alan Turing, the computer scientist reputed for helping to crack Nazi Germany’s Enigma code in World War II. The design detail-packed banknote will go into circulation on June 23, 2021, which would have been his 109th birthday.
Turing’s portrait, taken three years before his death, appears on the alternate side of the bill. The £50 edition is the last to join England’s lineup of polymer notes, allowing the Bank to finally depart from paper money, The Guardian reports.
His birthday isn’t the only Easter egg found in this edition. Given his work in security, the Bank made sure to push the note’s security-focused design features to the forefront, making it especially difficult to forge or replicate. A sunflower-shaped red foil patch, a nod to Turing’s studies of patterns in nature, along with the initials “AT,” prevents counterfeiting. The note also features a color-changing, see-through window with a portrait of the Queen, a security detail found in the polymer £20 version. An additional silver foil patch, on top of the Queen’s portrait, showcases the coronation crown in 3D.
The bill is also marked with Turing’s signature, ticker-tape printed with his date of birth in binary code, and one of his sayings: “This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be.”
Surrounding his portrait are a mathematical table and formulae from his 1936 paper On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, attributed as a building block for computer science, as well as technical drawings of devices that Turing helped develop.
A hologram image interchangeably reflects the words “Fifty” and “Pounds” under different angles. When the front side is placed under good-quality ultraviolet light, the digits “50” appear in bright red and green.
The addition of Alan Turing’s likeness to the banknote lineup also serves as a show of support for the LGBTQ+ community; in spite of his contributions, Turing was treated unkindly as he was gay. He died of cyanide poisoning, and his passing was later ruled as a suicide.
“By placing him on our new polymer £50 banknote, we are celebrating his achievements and the values he symbolizes,” explained Andrew Bailey, Bank of England governor.
A specimen illustrating the front of the new £50 banknote. Image via Bank of England
A specimen illustrating the back of the new £50 banknote. Image via Bank of England
[via The Guardian, images via Bank of England]
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