the enigma machine was invented in 1918 by arthur scherbius in berlin, it was, at the time a great way to encode messages, well, until it got beat. but now you can make one out of paper.

Arthur Scherbius, a German engineer, developed his 'Enigma' machine, capable of transcribing coded information, in the hope of interesting commercial companies in secure communications.

Enigma was invented by the German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I. The early models were used commercially from the early 1920s, and adopted by military and government services ...