Origins & Early Life

Thomas Harold Flowers (22 December 1905 – 28 October 1998) was an English engineer with the British General Post Office. During World War II, Flowers designed and built Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer, to help decipher encrypted German messages. Flowers was born at 160 Abbott Road, Bromley-by-Bow, then the Metropolitan Borough of Poplar, on 22 December 1905, the son of a bricklayer. He came from an impoverished working-class background and his grandmother had been a charwoman.

Pivotal Works & Achievements

He later recalled that as children "we were taught to be frugal in everything". Whilst undertaking an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, he took evening classes at the University of London to earn a degree in electrical engineering. In 1926, he joined the telecommunications branch of the General Post Office (GPO), moving to the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill in Middlesex in 1930. In 1935, Flowers married Eileen Margaret Green. The couple later had two children, John and Kenneth.

Enduring Legacy & Impact

From 1934 onward, he explored the use of electronics in telephone exchanges. By 1939, his design of equipment using 3000 to 4000 valves was...

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