It Is The Dream Of Every Flea Market Buyer,

to find something that the seller does not know the value of,

like this 3 rotor Heimsoeth & Rinke Enigma machine, produced in Berlin in 1941 the machine is functional and still in the original wooden box, both rarities, the Enigma machine is the most storied cryptography device in modern history, originally developed in the early 1920s, the technology was adopted by the German armed services in the late '20s and early '30s, the machine essentially allowed its operator to scramble messages by setting rotors in a certain position. If the operator on the other end knew the rotor setting, they could decipher the message. If not, the Enigma communications were almost impossible to crack, well the buyer knew much of this, the seller did not, 

at a flea market in Bucharest, Romania, there it was, after paying roughly $114 for the machine, Reuters reports that the cryptography machine sold at auction for roughly $51,620 to an anonymous online bidder earlier this week, the seller was no ordinary shopper. “It belonged to a mathematician who has spent most of his life decrypting codes,” Vlad Georgescu, relationship manager at Artmark, the auction house that sold the machine, tells Judith Vonberg at CNN, while the flea-market vendor thought the machine was a unique typewriter, the mathematician knew exactly what he was buying, and felt “compelled to purchase it.”

 if you want to see a fairly factual film about the role of Alan Turing, a British code breaker that cracked the code The Imitation Game is the film for you, we have watched it a couple of times, it is that good.