I was chatting to this mystery girl last night about her new toy, which is deeply thrilling to her, and this photo captured that little smirk of ownership so well that I got her permission to share it with the interwebs.
Looking at it this morning, however, it’s not her face that jumps out at me. It’s the apple logo – and the story behind it.
Most people who are techy or historical minded have probably heard of Alan Turing. For those who haven’t, his impressive biography is on Wikipedia here. He was instrumental both in the British WWII code-cracking efforts at Bletchley Park and, beyond that, in the development of computer science and the modern computer. If it weren’t for Turing, I wouldn’t be here writing this blog and you wouldn’t be here reading it. And, not incidentally, we might both be not-here in German.
This is where the tragedy comes in. Alan Turing was a brilliant scientist and highly respected, but he also had a boyfriend. Guess which personal detail weighed more heavily with the police in the 1950s? When the situation was drawn to the attention of the authorities (because Turing himself had to mention it to report a break-in at his house to the police) he was charged with ‘gross indecency’, lost his security clearance and lost his job. Rather than go to prison, he agreed to a course of hormone treatment. And then one June morning in 1954 he was found dead, with a half eaten apple beside him. The cause of death was cyanide poisoning.
Apparently nobody ever tested the apple, but the idea that Turing deliberately laced it with cyanide has a strong mythic echo and – who knows – might be true. At any rate, there is another popular myth (which Wikipedia has just told me is untrue) that the apple logo was designed to honour Alan Turing. It seems puzzling that any company making computers could accidentally pick a rainbow-striped half-eaten apple as a logo, but apparently that is what happened (link to Wikipedia again).
It always matter, I suppose, what original intentions were. I always think of Alan Turing when I see the apple logo – and now, I hope, you will too.
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