James Bond and his clever friends at MI6 have been famed over decades for their cool cars, amazing accessories and marvellous machines of land, sea and air. Here, Matthew Agius explains the Bond gadgets that made it into our lives (and a few we wish had). This article was originally published in the Cosmos Print Magazine, December 2022.
For 60 years, James Bond has been wielding an arsenal of amazing apparatus made by the propellerheads at Q Branch. Bond films are known for offering a glimpse into what’s technologically possible. From nifty reuses of everyday devices to attention-grabbing one-off inventions, here are the gadgets that have gone from reel to real[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 starts to exit the scene while Sean Connery’s Bond watches a red laser creep ominously towards his nether regions, cutting through the slab of gold to which our hero is bound.
The scene was a masterful concoction of sixties set design and visual effects. Connery was bound to a table, with a prop ‘laser’ gun slid above him. The bright red line was superimposed on the final print during post-production.
At the time of Goldfinger’s release, laser technology research was taking great strides, with then low-powered products. Could an international gold smuggler acquire such a weapon in the real world today?
Most definitely. Laser development has grown significantly since Bond foiled Goldfinger’s plan and the technology has broad applications across industry, 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, modern optical fibre lasers can harness tens of kilowatts of power for precision surgery, including bladeless eye surgery, or use super-focused light 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 better: “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 sleek, straight-from-the-lot Lotus Esprit off a jetty and into the ocean.
In The Spy Who Loved Me, Bond’s Lotus seamlessly transformed into a weapon-laden submarine. Credit: Sunset Boulevard/Getty Images.
Audiences watching 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me would have expected Roger Moore and Barbara Bach to drown, swim to safety or – more likely – to have a tech trick up their sleeves courtesy of Q (Desmond Llewellyn). Instead, the flick of a switch transforms the Lotus into a submarine outfitted with smokescreens, mines and rockets. That vehicle – nicknamed Wet Nellie – was built by a Floridian submarine maker using the shell of the original car. When submerged, the sub filled with water, and required two scuba-clad pilots to operate it.
The upshot is, even though Elon Musk now owns the famous Lotus ‘sub-Esprit’, it wouldn’t be a particularly pleasant – or convenient – vehicle to operate.
Enter Rinspeed. In 2008, the Swiss car builder launched a concept at the Geneva Motor Show: a Spy-inspired sub-car named ‘sQuba’.
Rather than the sleek seventies lines of the Esprit, the sQuba looks more like Lotus’s modern ‘Elise’ model – including the open top. SQuba drivers need to dress for wet weather.
Credit: Rinspeed.
“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,” explained Rinspeed founder Frank M Rinderknecht.
Aquatic adaptation is not where the Bond-like futurism of the sQuba ended: Rinspeed powered the vehicle with rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, and incorporated one of the earliest autonomous driving systems. With a build cost of more than $US1 million per car, it might not be such a surprise that the sQuba has never made it to market. Rinderknecht himself observed that the appeal of diving cars is probably limited to “toys for rich people”.
Smart guns
Licence to Kill
This 1989 outing gave a glimpse into firearm biometric technology when a vigilante Bond (played by Timothy Dalton) was given a handprint-reading sniper rifle. The concept was revisited in a more toned-down approach 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 announced his push to curb gun violence with similar technology.
“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 said.
Some smart guns use fingerprint reading technology like those described in the next section. Others use RFID (radio frequency identification) tech. In the same way that you can tap-and-go with your RFID-equipped credit card to send payment to a merchant, smart guns use an RFID chip in a ‘wearable’ object, such as a watch, bracelet or ring, to beam a unique radio frequency to unlock the weapon.
In 2022, firearms manufacturer LodeStar released a 9mm smart pistol that uses inbuilt biometric sensors, radio frequency chip detection and manual PIN entry to provide authorised users the ability to pull the trigger on an individual gun.
Phone fingerprint scanning
Tomorrow Never Dies
Today, you probably have a smartphone that uses fingerprint-scan tech, but in 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies, the world was still getting its head around mobile phones that fit in the palm of one’s hand. Pierce Brosnan’s snappy Ericsson was a precursor to today’s smartphones, but the fictional phone’s taser-like electric shock security system, and a touchpad to remotely steer his BMW, are yet to make their way into your new device.
The fingerprint scanner allowed Bond to ‘scan’ other biometric readers and use the print’s image on the phone screen to break into secure areas. Today’s phone fingerprint scanners use a biometric reader to digitally record the pattern of your finger- or thumbprint. Biometrics are the unique physical characteristics of individuals.
When Bond used fingerprint scanning technology in the 1997 outing Tomorrow Never Dies, the technology was not yet available to regular mobile phone users. Credit: MGM / Sony Pictures.
When it comes to thumb- and fingerprint scanners, a reader essentially captures a ‘signature’ image of your fingerprint, using either light, electricity, or ultrasound. Light (or optical) scanning illuminates your print, which an imaging sensor captures in 2D and translates into digital information that’s stored in your phone’s memory. Every time you use the scanner again, the fresh input of your print is matched to the original signature to authenticate access.
Capacitive scanning uses electrified capacitors to create a three-dimensional image of your print. Capacitive scanning ensures that every time your phone is unlocked, it’s your real thumb or finger doing it, and not just a very good picture.
Ultrasonic scanning maps the highest possible resolution image of your print. Ultrasounds measure the echoes of high-frequency soundwaves directed at your body. A scan of your finger records the reflected sound directed at its ridges and valleys. This information is used to create a precise, layered image of your print.
Credit: Mobile Phone Museum.
Many nations now use this technology to identify citizens at airports, while British police have (unpopularly) adopted them for ‘stop and scan’ identity checks.
Beyond this, Tomorrow Never Dies notably introduced a German-accented female voice (he was driving a BMW, after all) to announce to Bond each unsafe operation he performed on Hamburg roads. Today, many auto manufacturers have incorporated voice commands and responses into the consoles of their vehicles.
Heads up display
The Living Daylights
Credit: MGM / Sony PIctures
Credit: Mercedes Benz
Heads up display is now standard on many vehicles.
In 1987, Timothy Dalton’s Bond benefitted from rocket launchers behind the front lamps of his Aston Martin Vantage V8. To pick his target, Bond flicks a switch and two targeting reticules flash onto his windscreen, zeroing on a police roadblock.
Your car is unlikely to need the rockets, but dozens of automakers have begun incorporating heads up display – or HUD – technology into their vehicles. These HUDs project driving data onto the windscreen, including current speed and travel direction. Mercedes-Benz has even gone a step further by incorporating augmented reality experiences into its HUD – intelligently projecting directional arrows at turn points that get larger as the vehicle approaches. This technology, it’s suggested, would remove the risk of drivers diverting attention from the road to check their speedometer or maps.
Laser guns
The Man With The Golden Gun
The cheerfully diabolical eyes of Christopher Lee light up as he points a large cannon-like contraption at Bond’s seaplane. “This is the part I really like,” he smirks, before pushing a button and blowing up Bond’s escape craft.
Lee’s Scaramanga has hijacked a solar energy device, which supplies the electricity to operate his laser gun. Although a hyper-rich assassin wielding such technology to let off steam might be a little farfetched, it’s one of the more realistic portrayals of laser weaponry in cinema.
The use of the laser in The Man With The Golden Gun was a reasonably accurate representation of the technology. Credit: MGM / Sony Pictures.
That’s because when Lee ‘activates’ the gun, there’s no burst of coloured laser. Instead, we hear an electronic sting and see the result: a plane exploding. Perhaps the budget for The Man With The Golden Gun didn’t extend far enough to superimpose a ‘laser beam’, but the demonstration of this type of weapon is more accurate.
High-power, directed-energy weapons like the UK Ministry of Defence’s DragonFire LDEW (Laser Directed Energy Weapon) and the US military’s Laser Weapons System (LaWS) can be used to take down drones and burn out boat engines.
While the DragonFire’s first tests were completed at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory’s Porton Down range in southern England just last October, development on LaWS began in 2010 – and it is now installed and being tested aboard the US navy’s amphibious transport dock ship USS Portland.
Credit: Leon Neal/Getty Images
Its discharge is invisible – like Scaramanga’s fictional weapon – and costs just cents per shot to produce much the same effect as its Bond film equivalent.
“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 using conventional weapons to bring down a drone is that firing missiles or machine guns runs the risk of damaging someone, or something, particularly sensitive. On the other hand, using a high-powered laser beam to ground a drone avoids the unnecessary hassle of loading a missile tube, or accidently blowing up a nuclear reactor.
But it’s not yet an entirely safe practice.
“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 were instead greeted with an empty platform. The ‘invisible’ car’s tech: cameras on each side of the car that projected their view to screens opposite. This plot device was mocked, but Jaguar Land Rover managed to take that idea and implement it as part of in-cabin technology in 2014. The technology used tiny cameras mounted along the external structure of the vehicle to capture its surrounds. These images were then projected to the inside cabin’s frame, providing the driver with a blindspot-free view.
The invisible car may not have made the leap into real-life, but some of the tech it incorporated has. Credit: MGM / Sony Pictures.
BMW also made a foray into the world of invisible cars with the design of its ‘Vantablack’ BMW.
Vantablack is, currently, the darkest human-made substance. Designed for application as a satellite coating, it absorbs 99% of light, thus making objects coated with it appear as two-dimensional, black silhouettes. The safety issues of having a black spectre driving amongst us, paired with the paint’s five-figure price tag, means we’re unlikely to see it anytime soon.
Credit: BMW.