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A cache of Alan Turing’s most important scientific papers have been sold for £465,000 at auction, more than three times their expected sale price, after being saved from the shredder.
It had been estimated that the collection would sell for £150,000 in 13 separate lots but it fetched a total of £465,400 on Tuesday, which is understood to be a record for Turing material.
The treasure trove of some of the wartime codebreaker’s most important work was discovered gathering dust in a loft at a property in Bermondsey, south London. The archive was gifted to Turing’s best friend but it was almost destroyed after being found during a house clearance last November.
The papers were saved at the last minute when their significance was recognised at a family event and they went under the hammer in Etwall, Derbyshire. It included a personally signed copy of his 1938 PhD dissertation, Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals, which sold for £110,500.
Also featured was his 1936 paper On Computable Numbers, also known as Turing’s proof, which introduced the world to the idea of a universal computing machine. Described as the first programming manual of the computer age, it sold for £208,000, according to auctioneers Hansons.
The company’s founder, auctioneer Charles Hanson, said some of the items were among the “most important lots I’ve sold in my time”, adding: “It was a sale like no other, with lots like no other, a very memorable and special occasion which I was honoured to be a part of.
“They are iconic memories of an iconic man.”
The papers, known as offprints, had originally been given by Turing’s mother, Ethel, to her son’s friend and fellow mathematician Norman Routledge. They were produced in small numbers and distributed within academia, and rarely appear on the market.
Routledge kept the collection of the codebreaker’s offprints, which were eventually rescued by his nieces and nephews.
Jim Spencer, the director of Rare Book Auctions, said: “Nothing could’ve prepared me for what I was about to find in that carrier bag. These seemingly plain papers – perfectly preserved in the muted colours of their unadorned, academic wrappers – represent the foundations of computer science and modern digital computing.
“Literature has always been my forte, not mathematics, so the past few months of intensively researching and cataloguing these papers has left me feeling that Alan Turing was superhuman.”
Turing was one of the codebreakers at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes who played a vital role in cracking the German Enigma code, which was crucial to the allied victory in the second world war.
