Bond devices that went from reel to actual

James Bond and his intelligent buddies at MI6 have been famed over many years for his or her cool vehicles, wonderful equipment and marvellous machines of land, sea and air. Here, Matthew Agius explains the Bond devices that made it into our lives (and some we want had). This article was initially printed within the Cosmos Print Magazine, December 2022.

For 60 years, James Bond has been wielding an arsenal of fantastic equipment made by the propeller­heads at Q Branch. Bond movies are identified for providing a glimpse into what’s technologically attainable. From nifty reuses of on a regular basis units to attention-grabbing one-off innovations, listed below are the devices which have gone from reel to actual[ity].

Laser for gold and gland

Goldfinger

“Do you expect me to talk?” “No Mr Bond, I expect you to die!”

In this iconic scene, the villainous Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe) chuckles as he begins to exit the scene whereas Sean Connery’s Bond watches a pink laser creep ominously in direction of his nether areas, reducing by the slab of gold to which our hero is certain.

The scene was a masterful concoction of sixties set design and visible results. Connery was certain to a desk, with a prop ‘laser’ gun slid above him. The vivid pink line was superimposed on the ultimate print throughout post-production.

At the time of Goldfinger’s launch, laser know-how analysis was taking nice strides, with then low-powered merchandise. Could a world gold smuggler ­purchase such a weapon in the true world in the present day?

Most undoubtedly. Laser growth has grown considerably since Bond foiled Goldfinger’s plan and the know-how has broad functions throughout trade, as Professor David Lancaster from the University of South Australia’s Laser Physics and Photonics Devices Laboratory explains.

“There’s been a lot of breakthroughs in how to generate laser light from electricity – things called diode lasers which are in CD players and are used in telecommunications systems and LED torches,” Lancaster says. “LED torches are, really, the same technology that underpins a lot of the laser developments.”

While the pointer laser that entertains your cat is about one milliwatt, trendy optical fibre lasers can harness tens of kilowatts of energy for precision surgical procedure, together with bladeless eye surgical procedure, or use super-­centered gentle beams to kill tumours.

“These fibre lasers are millions of times brighter than what you can effectively buy off the shelf now.”

Lancaster endorses the Bond scene. “These days there are lasers that can burn metal from that sort of distance… a lot of the 3D printers are using lasers.”

Even higher: “It turns out they’re very good for cutting and welding human organs, like eyes, for instance – using these lasers to reweld the back of your retina if you’ve got retinal detachment.”

Submarine Car

The Spy Who Loved Me

Beset by machine-gun toting helicopters and rocket-launching sidecars? Why not drive your modern, straight-from-the-lot Lotus Esprit off a jetty and into the ocean.

Audiences watching 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me would have anticipated Roger Moore and Barbara Bach to drown, swim to security or – extra possible – to have a tech trick up their sleeves courtesy of Q (Desmond Llewellyn). Instead, the flick of a change transforms the Lotus right into a submarine outfitted with smokescreens, mines and rockets. That automobile – nicknamed Wet Nellie – was constructed by a Floridian submarine maker utilizing the shell of the unique automobile. When submerged, the sub stuffed with water, and required two scuba-clad pilots to function it.

The upshot is, despite the fact that Elon Musk now owns the well-known Lotus ‘sub-Esprit’, it wouldn’t be a very nice – or handy – automobile to function.

Enter Rinspeed. In 2008, the Swiss automobile builder launched an idea on the Geneva Motor Show: a Spy-inspired sub-car named ‘sQuba’.

Rather than the modern seventies traces of the Esprit, the sQuba appears extra like Lotus’s trendy ‘Elise’ mannequin – together with the open high. SQuba drivers want to decorate for moist climate.

“For safety reasons we have built the vehicle as an open car – so that the occupants can get out quickly in an emergency. With an enclosed cabin, opening the door might be impossible,” defined Rinspeed founder Frank M Rinderknecht.

Aquatic adaptation will not be the place the Bond-like futurism of the sQuba ended: Rinspeed powered the automobile with rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, and included one of many earliest autonomous driving programs. With a construct value of greater than $US1 million per automobile, it won’t be such a shock that the sQuba has by no means made it to market. Rinderknecht himself noticed that the enchantment of diving vehicles might be restricted to “toys for rich people”.

Smart weapons

Licence to Kill

This 1989 outing gave a glimpse into firearm biometric know-how when a vigilante Bond (performed by Timothy Dalton) was given a handprint-reading sniper rifle. The idea was revisited in a extra toned-down strategy when Daniel Craig’s Bond was given his new, can-only-be-used-by-you Walther PPK in 2012’s Skyfall. Four years later, US President Barack Obama introduced his push to curb gun violence with related know-how.

“If America has the ­technology to prevent a criminal from stealing and using your smartphone, then we should be able to prevent the wrong person from pulling a trigger on a gun,” Obama stated.

Some sensible weapons use fingerprint studying know-how like these described within the subsequent part. Others use RFID (radio frequency identification) tech. In the identical approach which you can tap-and-go along with your RFID-equipped bank card to ship fee to a service provider, sensible weapons use an RFID chip in a ‘wearable’ object, reminiscent of a watch, bracelet or ring, to beam a novel radio frequency to unlock the weapon.

In 2022, firearms producer LodeStar launched a 9mm sensible pistol that makes use of inbuilt biometric sensors, radio frequency chip detection and handbook PIN entry to offer authorised customers the flexibility to drag the set off on a person gun.

Phone fingerprint scanning

Tomorrow Never Dies

Today, you most likely have a smartphone that makes use of fingerprint-scan tech, however in 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies, the world was nonetheless getting its head round cell phones that match within the palm of 1’s hand. Pierce Brosnan’s snappy Ericsson was a precursor to in the present day’s smartphones, however the fictional cellphone’s taser-like electrical shock safety system, and a touchpad to remotely steer his BMW, are but to make their approach into your new gadget.

The fingerprint scanner allowed Bond to ‘scan’ different biometric readers and use the print’s picture on the cellphone display screen to interrupt into safe areas. Today’s cellphone finger­print scanners use a biometric reader to digitally document the sample of your finger- or thumbprint. Biometrics are the distinctive bodily traits of people.

When it involves thumb- and fingerprint scanners, a reader basically captures a ‘signature’ picture of your fingerprint, utilizing both gentle, electrical energy, or ultrasound. Light (or optical) scanning illuminates your print, which an imaging sensor captures in 2D and interprets into digital info that’s saved in your cellphone’s reminiscence. Every time you utilize the scanner once more, the contemporary enter of your print is matched to the unique signature to authenticate entry.

Capacitive scanning makes use of electrified capacitors to create a three-dimensional picture of your print. Capacitive scanning ensures that each time your cellphone is unlocked, it’s your actual thumb or finger doing it, and never simply an excellent image.

 Ultrasonic scanning maps the best attainable decision picture of your print. Ultrasounds measure the echoes of high-frequency soundwaves directed at your physique. A scan of your finger information the mirrored sound directed at its ridges and valleys. This info is used to create a exact, layered picture of your print.

Many nations now use this know-how to determine residents at airports, whereas British police have (unpopularly) adopted them for ‘stop and scan’ id checks.

Beyond this, Tomorrow Never Dies notably launched a German-accented feminine voice (he was driving a BMW, in spite of everything) to announce to Bond every unsafe operation he carried out on Hamburg roads. Today, many vehicle producers have included voice instructions and responses into the consoles of their autos.

Heads up show

The Living Daylights

In 1987, Timothy Dalton’s Bond benefitted from rocket launchers behind the entrance lamps of his Aston Martin Vantage V8. To choose his goal, Bond flicks a change and two concentrating on reticules flash onto his windscreen, zeroing on a police roadblock.

Your automobile is unlikely to want the rockets, however dozens of automakers have begun incorporating heads up show – or HUD – know-how into their autos. These HUDs mission driving information onto the windscreen, together with present pace and journey route. Mercedes-Benz has even gone a step additional by incorporating augmented actuality experiences into its HUD – intelligently projecting directional arrows at flip factors that get bigger because the automobile approaches. This know-how, it’s prompt, would take away the chance of drivers diverting consideration from the highway to test their speedometer or maps.

Laser weapons

The Man With The Golden Gun

The cheerfully diabolical eyes of Christopher Lee gentle up as he factors a big cannon-like contraption at Bond’s seaplane. “This is the part I really like,” he smirks, earlier than pushing a button and ­blowing up Bond’s escape craft.

Lee’s Scaramanga has hijacked a photo voltaic vitality gadget, which provides the electrical energy to function his laser gun. Although a ­hyper-rich murderer wielding such know-how to let off steam is perhaps somewhat farfetched, it’s one of many extra practical portrayals of laser weaponry in cinema.

That’s as a result of when Lee ‘activates’ the gun, there’s no burst of colored laser. Instead, we hear an digital sting and see the consequence: a aircraft exploding. Perhaps the price range for The Man With The Golden Gun didn’t prolong far sufficient to superimpose a ‘laser beam’, however the demonstration of such a weapon is extra correct.

High-power, directed-energy weapons just like the UK Ministry of Defence’s Dragon­Fire LDEW (Laser Directed Energy Weapon) and the US army’s Laser Weapons System (LaWS) can be utilized to take down drones and burn out boat engines.

While the DragonFire’s first exams had been accomplished on the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory’s Porton Down vary in southern England simply final October, growth on LaWS started in 2010 – and it’s now put in and being examined aboard the US navy’s amphibious transport dock ship USS Portland.

Its discharge is invisible – like Scaramanga’s fictional weapon – and prices simply cents per shot to supply a lot the identical impact as its Bond movie equal.

“But it’s never been practical; it’s always been a technology that is just too hard, and needs rooms of PhDs to make it work,” says Lancaster. “Now, you can actually get these modules that are made commercially for manufacturing, and that’s what the US military is using.”

A key concern about utilizing standard weapons to deliver down a drone is that firing missiles or machine weapons runs the chance of damaging somebody, or one thing, notably delicate. On the opposite hand, utilizing a high-powered laser beam to floor a drone avoids the pointless problem of loading a missile tube, or accidently blowing up a nuclear reactor.

But it’s not but an fully secure follow.

“One of the biggest issues with lasers, like [those portrayed] in Goldfinger… if you were doing that in real life, it would burn your eyes out within fractions of a second, because the intensity is probably like looking at a hundred suns,” says Lancaster.

“Back in those days, you could look at a laser ‘burning’, but you’re going to end up with spots in our eyes and probably wake up blind the next day.”

Invisible autos

Die Another Day

When Q (John Cleese) rolled out Brosnan’s new Aston Martin in Die Another Day, viewers had been as a substitute greeted with an empty platform. The ‘invisible’ automobile’s tech: cameras on all sides of the automobile that projected their view to screens reverse. This plot gadget was mocked, however Jaguar Land Rover managed to take that concept and implement it as a part of in-cabin know-how in 2014. The know-how used tiny cameras mounted alongside the exterior construction of the automobile to seize its surrounds. These pictures had been then projected to the within cabin’s body, offering the motive force with a blindspot-free view.

BMW additionally made a foray into the world of invisible vehicles with the design of its ‘Vantablack’ BMW.

Vantablack is, presently, the darkest human-made substance. Designed for software as a satellite tv for pc coating, it absorbs 99% of sunshine, thus making objects coated with it seem as two-dimensional, black silhouettes. The questions of safety of getting a black spectre driving amongst us, paired with the paint’s five-figure price ticket, means we’re unlikely to see it anytime quickly.