Thomas Harold Flowers MBE was an English engineer with the British General Post Office.
18 Facts About Tommy Flowers
2.
Tommy Flowers was born at 160 Abbott Road, Poplar in London's East End on 22 December 1905, the son of a bricklayer.
3.
Tommy Flowers was convinced that an all-electronic system was possible.
4.
Tommy Flowers proposed a more sophisticated alternative, using an electronic system, which his staff called Colossus, using perhaps 1,800 thermionic valves instead of 150 and having only one paper tape instead of two by generating the wheel patterns electronically.
5.
Tommy Flowers countered that the British telephone system used thousands of valves and was reliable because the electronics were operated in a stable environment with the circuitry on all the time.
6.
The Bletchley management were not convinced and merely encouraged Tommy Flowers to proceed on his own.
7.
Tommy Flowers did so at the Post Office Research Labs, using some of his own funds to build it.
8.
Tommy Flowers had first met Turing in 1939 but was treated with disdain by Gordon Welchman, because of his advocacy of valves rather than relays.
9.
On 2 June 1943, Tommy Flowers was made a member of the Order of the British Empire.
10.
Tommy Flowers was left in debt after the war after using his own personal funds to build Colossus.
11.
Tommy Flowers applied for a loan from the Bank of England to build another machine like Colossus but was denied the loan because the bank did not believe that such a machine could work.
12.
Tommy Flowers remained at the Post Office Research Station where he was Head of the Switching Division.
13.
Tommy Flowers's family had known only that he had done some 'secret and important' work.
14.
Tommy Flowers died in 1998 aged 92, leaving a wife and two sons.
15.
Tommy Flowers is commemorated at the Post Office Research Station site, which became a housing development, with the main building converted into a block of flats and an access road called Tommy Flowers Close.
16.
Tommy Flowers was honoured by London Borough of Tower Hamlets, where he was born.
17.
An Information and Communications Technology centre for young people, the Tommy Flowers Centre, opened there in November 2010.
18.
Tommy Flowers knew that Sale was rebuilding a MKII version, describing the design and construction which was instrumental in its reconstruction.