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The new £50 note revealed - Alan Turing

  • Emma Youell

On 3 November 2018, the Bank of England launched their 'Think Science!' campaign, asking the people in the UK to nominate the scientist they would like to see on the polymer £50 note. On the 15th July 2019, Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney, announced that Alan Turing will appear on the new £50 polymer note.Making the announcement at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, the Governor also revealed the imagery depicting Alan Turing and his work that will be used for the reverse of the note. The new polymer £50 note is expected to enter circulation by the end of 2021. The challenge To create an engaging video that would reveal the entire design of the new £50 note.  The idea Alan Turing was to be revealed as the person on the £50 note, so the idea was to use graphics from his papers and visual elements from computing and machinery combined with mathematics, combined together to unveil at the end, the new note. Role Motion Graphic Designer

The new £50 note will celebrate Alan Turing and his pioneering work with computers. As shown in the concept image, the design on the reverse of the note will feature:
• A photo of Turing taken in 1951 by Elliott & Fry which is part of the Photographs Collection at the National Portrait Gallery.
• A table and mathematical formulae from Turing’s seminal 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungs problem” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. This paper is widely recognised as being foundational for computer science.  It sought to establish whether there could be a definitive method by which any theorem could be assessed as provable or not using a universal machine. It introduced the concept of a Turing machine as a thought experiment of how computers could operate.
• The Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) Pilot Machine which was developed at the National Physical Laboratory as the trial model of Turing’s pioneering ACE design. The ACE was one of the first electronic stored-program digital computers.
• Technical drawings for the British Bombe, the machine specified by Turing and one of the primary tools used to break Enigma-enciphered messages during WWII.
• A quote from Alan Turing, given in an interview to The Times newspaper on 11 June 1949: “This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be.”
• Turing’s signature from the visitor’s book at Bletchley Park in 1947, where he worked during WWII.
• Ticker tape depicting Alan Turing’s birth date (23 June 1912) in binary code. The concept of a machine fed by binary tape featured in the Turing’s 1936 paper.
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