Some rare papers written by Alan Turing, the famous World War Two codebreaker and pioneer of modern computing were recently discovered in a loft.
Turing played a major role in World War II by helping to break secret German codes using Enigma machine.
These important documents, including his PhD dissertation from the 1930s were sold at an auction in Derbyshire.
Altogether, they sold for a record-breaking amount of £465,400. One of the papers, On Computable Numbers, was especially valuable and sold for £208,000.
Auctioneer Charles Hanson said, "To think these precious papers could've been lost to the shredder and now they will go on to educate and inspire generations."
"Turing was a man ahead of his time, and through these pages, he lives on," he added.
These papers had originally been given by Turing to his friend and fellow mathematician, Norman Routledge.
After Routledge passed away in 2013, the documents remained in his home in Bermondsey, London until one of his sisters took them.
For years, no one paid attention to them and eventually when the sister moved into a care home, her daughters discovered the papers and almost shredded them.
Fortunately, they decided to check with other family members before dong so who then realized how important the papers were.
Besides Turing's research papers, the auction also included personal belongings in which one important item was a handwritten letter from his mother, Ethel Turing, in which she explained why she was giving her son's papers to his friend Norman Routledge.
