How many blocks giza pyramid

Introduced in , the machine was a failure. Also in , Hagelin's son Bo, who was the company's sales manager for the Americas and who had opposed the transaction, died in a car crash near Washington, D. Although the H was a failure, it was succeeded by a machine called the H, of which thousands were sold.

The H was designed with NSA assistance. To generate random numbers, it used multiple shift registers based on the then-emerging technology of CMOS electronics. This mathematical algorithm was created by the NSA, which could therefore decrypt any messages enciphered by the machine. From then on, its electronic machines, such as the HC series, were secretly designed by the NSA, sometimes with the help of corporate partners such as Motorola.

This U. The backdooring of all CAG machines continued until , when the company was liquidated. William F. Friedman [top] dominated U. National Security Agency. His friend Boris Hagelin [bottom], a brilliant Swedish inventor and entrepreneur, founded Crypto AG in in Zug, Switzerland, and built it into the world's largest cipher-machine company. TOP, U. Parts of this story emerged in leaks by CAG employees before and, especially, in a subsequent investigation by the Washington Post and a pair of European broadcasters, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen , in Germany, and Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen , in Switzerland.

The Post 's article , published on 11 February , touched off firestorms in the fields of cryptology, information security, and intelligence. The revelations badly damaged the Swiss reputation for discretion and dependability. They triggered civil and criminal litigation and an investigation by the Swiss government and, just this past May, led to the resignation of the Swiss intelligence chief Jean-Philippe Gaudin, who had fallen out with the defense minister over how the revelations had been handled.

In fact, there's an interesting parallel to our modern era, in which backdoors are increasingly common and the FBI and other U. Even before these revelations, I was deeply fascinated by the HX, the last of the great rotor machines.

This particular unit, different from the one I had seen a decade before, had been untouched since I immediately began to plan the restoration of this historically resonant machine. People have been using codes and ciphers to protect sensitive information for a couple of thousand years.

The first ciphers were based on hand calculations and tables. In , a mechanical device that became known as the Alberti cipher wheel was introduced. Then, just after World War I, an enormous breakthrough occurred, one of the greatest in cryptographic history : Edward Hebern in the United States, Hugo Koch in the Netherlands, and Arthur Scherbius in Germany, within months of one another, patented electromechanical machines that used rotors to encipher messages.

Thus began the era of the rotor machine. Scherbius's machine became the basis for the famous Enigma used by the German military from the s until the end of WW II. To understand how a rotor machine works, first recall the basic goal of cryptography: substituting each of the letters in a message, called plaintext, with other letters in order to produce an unreadable message, called ciphertext. It's not enough to make the same substitution every time—replacing every F with a Q , for example, and every K with an H.

Such a monoalphabetic cipher would be easily solved. A simple cipher machine, such as the Enigma machine used by the German Army during World War II, has three rotors, each with 26 positions. Each position corresponds to a letter of the alphabet.

Electric current enters at a position on one side of the first rotor, corresponding to a letter, say T. The current travels through two other rotors in the same way and then, finally, exits the third rotor at a position that corresponds to a different letter, say R.

So in this case, the letter T has been encrypted as R. The next time the operator strikes a key, one or more of the rotors move with respect to one another, so the next letter is encrypted with an entirely different set of permutations. In the Enigma cipher machines [below] a plugboard added a fixed scramble to the encipherment of the rotors, swapping up to 13 letter pairs.

A rotor machine gets around that problem using—you guessed it—rotors. Start with a round disk that's roughly the diameter of a hockey puck, but thinner. On both sides of the disk, spaced evenly around the edge, are 26 metal contacts, each corresponding to a letter of the English alphabet.

Inside the disk are wires connecting a contact on one side of the disk to a different one on the other side. The disk is connected electrically to a typewriter-like keyboard. When a user hits a key on the keyboard, say W , electric current flows to the W position on one side of the rotor. The current goes through a wire in the rotor and comes out at another position, say L. However, after that keystroke, the rotor rotates one or more positions.

So the next time the user hits the W key, the letter will be encrypted not as L but rather as some other letter. Though more challenging than simple substitution, such a basic, one-rotor machine would be child's play for a trained cryptanalyst to solve. So rotor machines used multiple rotors. Versions of the Enigma, for example, had either three rotors or four. In operation, each rotor moved at varying intervals with respect to the others: A keystroke could move one rotor or two, or all of them.

Operators further complicated the encryption scheme by choosing from an assortment of rotors, each wired differently, to insert in their machine. Military Enigma machines also had a plugboard, which swapped specific pairs of letters both at the keyboard input and at the output lamps. The rotor-machine era finally ended around , with the advent of electronic and software encryption, although a Soviet rotor machine called Fialka was deployed well into the s.

The HX pushed the envelope of cryptography. For starters it has a bank of nine removable rotors. The unit I acquired has a cast-aluminum base, a power supply, a motor drive, a mechanical keyboard, and a paper-tape printer designed to display both the input text and either the enciphered or deciphered text.

In encryption mode, the operator types in the plaintext, and the encrypted message is printed out on the paper tape. Each plaintext letter typed into the keyboard is scrambled according to the many permutations of the rotor bank and modificator to yield the ciphertext letter.

In decryption mode, the process is reversed. The user types in the encrypted message, and both the original and decrypted message are printed, character by character and side by side, on the paper tape. While encrypting or decrypting a message, the HX prints both the original and the encrypted message on paper tape.

The blue wheels are made of an absorbent foam that soaks up ink and applies it to the embossed print wheels.

Beneath the nine rotors on the HX are nine keys that unlock each rotor to set the initial rotor position before starting a message. That initial position is an important component of the cryptographic key. To begin encrypting a message, you select nine rotors out of 12 and set up the rotor pins that determine the stepping motion of the rotors relative to one another.

Then you place the rotors in the machine in a specific order from right to left, and set each rotor in a specific starting position. Finally, you set each of the 41 modificator switches to a previously determined position. To decrypt the message, those same rotors and settings, along with those of the modificator, must be re-created in the receiver's identical machine. All of these positions, wirings, and settings of the rotors and of the modificator are collectively known as the key. The HX includes, in addition to the hand crank, a nickel-cadmium battery to run the rotor circuit and printer if no mains power is available.

A volt DC linear power supply runs the motor and printer and charges the battery. The precision volt motor runs continuously, driving the rotors and the printer shaft through a reduction gear and a clutch. Pressing a key on the keyboard releases a mechanical stop, so the gear drive propels the machine through a single cycle, turning the shaft, which advances the rotors and prints a character. The printer has two embossed alphabet wheels, which rotate on each keystroke and are stopped at the desired letter by four solenoids and ratchet mechanisms.

Fed by output from the rotor bank and keyboard, mechanical shaft encoders sense the position of the alphabet printing wheels and stop the rotation at the required letter. Each alphabet wheel has its own encoder.

One set prints the input on the left half of the paper tape; the other prints the output on the right side of the tape. After an alphabet wheel is stopped, a cam releases a print hammer, which strikes the paper tape against the embossed letter. At the last step the motor advances the paper tape, completing the cycle, and the machine is ready for the next letter. As I began restoring the HX, I quickly realized the scope of the challenge.

The Great Pyramid of Giza contains 2. The problem? Each block weighs at least 2 tons. So how would you move all those rocks? Great Pyramid of Giza from a 19th-century stereopticon card photo public domain. And though the inner core of limestone blocks came from a nearby quarry, the decorative higher-quality white limestone on the outside had to be transported from across the Nile, while ,, pounds of pinkish granite was procured from over miles away, according to Forbes.

There are even paintings on the wall of the tomb of a later Egyptian nomarch showing workers and not aliens hauling a statue weighing 58 metric tons on an enormous hand-drawn sled. Photo by Sir John Gardner Wilkinson public domain. Tallet had discovered the ancient rolls in the remains of a massive yet orderly boat-storage facility.

Boats may have been stored during the months when the Red Sea was turbulent, then retrieved in calmer seasons.

In Tallet was demurring on calls to make a bold pronouncement on the larger significance of his discoveries. Researchers also used a 3D laser to scan a ceremonial boat — after restoring it from original wooden planks — to study how the boats were assembled. And more lasers are being used to map the inside of the pyramid without disturbing its structure, leading to new evidence of hidden rooms. His team also discovered copper-smelting pots — copper at the time being the hardest metal known to man.

The Egyptians needed a lot of it to keep cutting those stone blocks. It was apparently very prestigious to be part of the royal boat crews, where the workers were fed with meat, poultry, fish and even beer. After its construction, it remained the tallest man-made structure on earth for the next 3, years. Covering an area of 13 acres, the massive monument was designed to align with the points of the compass and built with an estimated 2.

The workforce is thought to have consisted of thousands of skilled tradesmen and paid laborers, as opposed to slaves, and estimates suggest the project took about two decades to complete. Over the ages, all three pyramids have been targeted by grave robbers and much of their exterior white limestone stolen, possibly for use in other building projects. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

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