The AVA Radio Company ( Polish: ''Wytwórnia Radiotechniczna AVA'') was a Polish electronics firm founded in 1929 in Warsaw, Poland. AVA designed and built radio equipment for the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau, which was responsible for the radio communications of the General Staff's ''Oddział II'' (Section II, the General Staff's intelligence section). After the Cipher Bureau's mathematician- cryptologist

Marian Rejewski Marian Adam Rejewski (; 16 August 1905 – 13 February 1980) was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who in late 1932 reconstructed the sight-unseen German military Enigma cipher machine, aided by limited documents obtained by French mili ...

in late December 1932 deduced the wiring in the German military Enigma

rotor cipher machine In cryptography, a rotor machine is an electro-mechanical stream cipher device used for encrypting and decrypting messages. Rotor machines were the cryptographic state-of-the-art for much of the 20th century; they were in widespread use in the 19 ...

, AVA built Enigma "doubles" as well as all the electro-mechanical equipment designed at the Cipher Bureau to expedite decryption of Enigma ciphers.

History

AVA's four directors were

Edward Fokczyński Edward Fokczyński was one of the four directors of the AVA Radio Company, an electronics firm established in Warsaw, Poland, in 1929. AVA produced radio equipment for the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau, which was responsible for the radio ...

, Antoni Palluth,

Ludomir Danilewicz Ludomir Danilewicz (1905–1960) was a Polish engineer and, for some ten years before the outbreak of World War II, one of the four directors of the AVA Radio Company in Warsaw, Poland. AVA designed and built radio equipment for the Polish General ...

, and his younger brother

Leonard Danilewicz Leonard Stanisław Danilewicz was a Polish engineer and, for some ten years before the outbreak of World War II, one of the four directors of the AVA Radio Company in Warsaw, Poland. Cipher Bureau work AVA designed and built radio equipment for the ...

. The company took its name from the combined radio

callsign In broadcasting and radio communications, a call sign (also known as a call name or call letters—and historically as a call signal—or abbreviated as a call) is a unique identifier for a transmitter station. A call sign can be formally assigne ...

s of the Danilewicz brothers (''TPAV'') and Palluth (''TPVA''). When the company was being formed in 1929, the Danilewicz brothers were short-wave " hams" and students at the Warsaw Polytechnic. In 1927, Fokczyński had opened a small radio workshop on Warsaw's

New World Street New is an adjective referring to something recently made, discovered, or created. New or NEW may refer to: Music * New, singer of K-pop group The Boyz Albums and EPs * ''New'' (album), by Paul McCartney, 2013 * ''New'' (EP), by Regurgitator, ...

. Sporadically he had received orders from the Cipher Bureau, whose Captain Maksymilian Ciężki knew Fokczyński from his 1919–22 army service. Beginning in 1929, the modest shop, ten minutes' walk from the

General Staff building The General Staff Building (russian: Здание Главного штаба, ''Zdanie Glavnogo Shtaba'') is an edifice with a 580 m long bow-shaped facade, situated on Palace Square in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in front of the Winter Palace. T ...

, which housed the Cipher Bureau, was transformed into AVA. The company subsequently moved to new facilities in southern Warsaw's Mokotów district. Early on, the fledgling company was severely under-capitalized. All four directors, however, had other jobs; and soon the Cipher Bureau came to the rescue with an order for eight 10-watt short-wave radio stations, which became the embryo of Section II's radio network. AVA also won other clients, including the Polish Navy and Professor Lugeon of the Warsaw Meteoroglogical Institute, for whom AVA built, to his design, an ''atmoradiograf'' that registered disturbances in the atmosphere; this, Leonard Danilewicz later recalled, was the unheralded beginning of

radioastronomy Radio astronomy is a subfield of astronomy that studies celestial objects at radio frequencies. The first detection of radio waves from an astronomical object was in 1933, when Karl Jansky at Bell Telephone Laboratories reported radiation coming f ...

. The

General Staff A military staff or general staff (also referred to as army staff, navy staff, or air staff within the individual services) is a group of officers, enlisted and civilian staff who serve the commander of a division or other large military un ...

's Cipher Bureau was responsible for the radio communications of the General Staff's Section II (Intelligence section). The Cipher Bureau entrusted the design and construction of the equipment to AVA. The work was carried out on a cost-plus basis, to the benefit of both AVA and the General Staff. In December 1932, the Cipher Bureau's mathematician-cryptologist Marian Rejewski reconstructed the wiring of the German Enigma machine. The Poles' subsequent reading of German

cipher In cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is ''encipherment''. To encipher or encode i ...

s laid the foundation for the western Allies' Ultra cipher-breaking operations, beginning seven years later, during World War II. Now, in January 1933, just as Hitler was coming to power in Germany, AVA quickly produced a "double" of the Enigma machine; by mid-1934, it had made over a dozen. In 1934 or 1935, AVA built the

cyclometer The cyclometer was a cryptologic device designed, "probably in 1934 or 1935," by Marian Rejewski of the Polish Cipher Bureau's German section (BS-4) to facilitate decryption of German Enigma ciphertext. The original machines are believed to ...

, a device designed by Rejewski to prepare a " card catalog" that facilitated the decryption of Enigma messages. In 1938 AVA built the " cryptologic bomb," invented by Rejewski about October 1938. This was an electrically powered aggregate of six Enigmas that took the place of some one hundred workers. Six bombs were built before September 1939. Actual assembly of the cyclometers, "bombs" and

Lacida The Lacida, also called LCD, was a Polish rotor cipher machine. It was designed and produced before World War II by Poland's Cipher Bureau for prospective wartime use by Polish military higher commands. History The machine's name derived from ...

cipher machines was carried out not at the AVA facilities but in Room 13 (the "Clock Room") at the Cipher Bureau in the General Staff building—and, from 1937, at the new Cipher Bureau center in the Kabaty Woods south of Warsaw. No one had access to this room except the head of the Cipher Bureau,

Gwido Langer Lt. Col. Karol Gwido Langer (Žilina, Zsolna, Austria-Hungary, 2 September 1894 – 30 March 1948, Kinross, Scotland) was, from at least mid-1931, chief of the Polish General Staff's Biuro Szyfrów, Cipher Bureau, which from December 1932 decr ...

, the head of its German section (''B.S. 4''), Maksymilian Ciężki, and personnel employed there: Antoni Palluth,

, his younger brother Leonard,

, and the specialist in precision mechanics, Czesław Betlewski. In July 1941, Marian Rejewski and Henryk Zygalski were asked to test the security of the Lacida at the Cadiz Center, near Uzès (free zone). The device had apparently not been rigorously tested before approval, because the two mathematicians decrypted a message in less than two hours. Their dismayed boss gave up using the machine.

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