TechStuff Classic: TechStuff Bonds With Spy Tech Part One

called text Stuff Bonds with Spy Tech Part one. There's a lot of fun looking back at the different types of gear that has been featured both in spy films and has actually played a part in espionage and various secret agencies. It is a fascinating subject, one that is filled with a lot of innovation, a lot of failed innovation as well. Uh. The Spy Museum in Washington, d C. Is absolutely fascinating to walk through if you have the time.

I recommend it. Once things are safe to go out and about at museums again, and let us listen to this classic episode. This is behind the curtain. Guys. We had to go in and start deleting stuff because it was so much We're like we can't do a five part episode about James Bond. Yeah, yeah, I mean over the course. Okay. So this is a phenomenon, a global phenomenon that was based on a single n novel, Casino Royale, written by Ian Fleming, who better known as, of course,

the creator of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Clearly he wrote all of the all of the James Bond novels that you know, he originally created from this Jamaican estate that he had called Golden Eye, and it all branched out from there into the beautiful goofy thing that we have today. And and there's you know, some arrows of James Bond that were significantly more goofy than others. I think the more years, the Roger Moore years in particular, guy goofy.

And and because there is a lot to cover, and some of it we want to relate to actual real world technology and kind of explain which ones are realistic and which ones aren't. Because there's so much, we are going to do a two parter because it's just otherwise we would have to just pick and choose and it would be really unsatisfying at least for us. Yes, yes, but so yeah, a Bond himself gets most of his gear from m I six and from specifically they're Q

standing for Quartermaster Branch. Yes, and so you often will find that the various UH people that Bond ends up interacting with at m I six go by a specific letter Q or M being the two big ones and UH and Q of course is the the person in charge of giving out all of the weird gadgets, and usually at some point in the rollout gives a little gives a little, you know, Bond a little kind of a slap on the wrist saying could you please stop blowing up the stuff I give you? Because all of

these wonderful things. I mean, we didn't list to the number of things that we're going to talk about that he has blown up, but I mean it's safe to say that it's most of them. Yeah, yeah, he's not only not only as he blown up most of his gadgets. I think at this point he's blown up most of Europe.

But no, no, that's that's that's accurate. I did want to note that Fleming himself was in the naval intelligence for the British Royal Naval Reserve in World War Two, and that It's been suggested that that because Fleming was doing a little bit of field work, you know, breaking in and entering to photograph sensitive documents that sort of thing, that that the character of James Bond was a highly

romanticized version of himself. Yeah, As it turns out, the stuff that spies really do and the stuff that James Bond does are not necessarily aligned. I mean, I don't know that there are many spies who actually have these incredibly flashy lives that bring a lot of attention to themselves. Like I can't imagine a spy walking into a casino and winning game after game after game, drawing attention to him or herself, because that seems like it's antithetically yeah

to being a spy, but at any rate. But but some of the tech that James Bond uses is actually very real world correlation. Sure, so let's start off with one of the iconic pieces of technology that James Bond depends upon in practically every movie. Now it's a little different from the novels series and the movie series, but in the movies he has a side arm, the Vaulter or Walter p p K, which is the one he

carries in most of the movies. There is a point where he switches from the p p K to the P ninety nine that would be in the movie Tomorrow Never Dies and from there all the way through to Casino Royale, that's what he's using. But then it goes back to the p p K. Now p p K stands for police pistol detective model. And you might think, well, where does the K come from? It comes from the German word, which is, let's try this, okay, police, the police I pistol criminal model. Oh boy, I know I

butchered that one. You're probably doing it better than I would. And and in German it is in fact pronounced Walter, yes, yes, but but in British and American it's Walter dialect. What it is spelled w A L T h e R. But the Germans do not have a sound. It's a it's a hard T or or a D sometimes depending upon what part of Germany. But at any rate, so this is a very small gun, which makes sense. It has to be concealable, right, So it's a small gun.

It's semi automatic, it's double action, it's pretty reliable. Yeah, it's often used in various law enforcement agencies throughout all of Europe. Both the the p p K and the Pine were, and so it's one of those that um you find all over the place in Europe. So it made sense, and in fact, in the novels, I think he has a barretta. Originally in the first few novels he was carrying a barretta until a fan named Geoffrey um Our Jeffrey Boothroyd, I've clearly been watching too much

Game of Throne. Sorry, Um road in and recommended more appropriate weapons in ninety six, and Fleming went in and made the switch, and then furthermore honored Jeffrey by naming Q after him. The character of Q up through Um up to the point when the original actor passed away, I believe, was named Major Boy. So also, you know in in the Casino Royal Movie or Casino Royal Movie with Daniel Craig Um the Jumping Way Ahead. But in that film, apparently he is convinced to hand over his

baretta to trade up to the Vaulter cute. I don't remember that because I've more or less plucked that film from my mind. I have not seen it. I know, I haven't seen any of the Daniel krass Man. I enjoyed the at least I really liked the last one. Um.

But we can talk about that later on. But before we get into our big list, because it is very big, um, I did want to mention that there is a a term for the kind of plot device that most of these James Bond gadgets are, because they are not just devices, they are plot devices, um. And and it's called a Chekhov gun after Russian author Anton Chekhov and his observation that and which which relates to stage play more so

than movie play. But anyway, don't put a rifle on the wall unless it's going to go off, right, if you're going to if you're going to put something in a conspicuous spot that the audience sees, you cannot then deny the audience the payoff of of using that, right, You can't. You can't not use it. In fact, there are a lot of films that follow the same sort of approach. The first one that jumps to my mind

Shaun of the Dead. They look at the Winchester on the wall and you know that at some point they're going to have to shoot that gun. Yeah, Yeah, that was in slither by the way right. Yes, that is a good point. Yes, you can also play with this by by reversing it. Every rule is made to be broken. Yes, so let's dive in. Now. We're gonna go chronologically as far as the films go, which means we're gonna jump around a couple of different Bonds. But I'll explain a

little bit of that when we hit there. So, the first James Bond film to come out was in nineteen sixty two and it was Dr No. And that was when you know they had our first James was shut and Connery as a as Bond. Now. Dr No is one of the movies where you see James Bond doing all of his spy stuff, but they're not really all these crazy gadgets that a lot of us associate with Bond based upon later films. Yeah. Yeah, there was like one self destructor bag in that movie, I think, and

that was really the only standout tech that happened. Yeah, And in that case, the bag, the purpose of the bag was so that it would destroy any case notes that were inside the bag, so that if Bond had been captured, those notes could be destroyed and there would be no evidence of what M I six did and did not know, So it was purely defensive in that sense. It wasn't a weapon. It was just to destroy documents.

But then we move on to nineteen sixty three two From Russia with Love, and boy, we got a very earnest request from a coworker about a particular gadget that shows up in this movie. So earnest um, Robert over on Stuff to blow your mind, wrote us in on both Twitter and Tumbler, where we had we had posted a query on Twitter, Tumbler and Facebook to ask ask people to write in and tell us their favorite Bond gadget and why, And Robert responded in not one but

two places. Yes, he said, you've got to talk about the briefcase and From Russia with Love. Which is interesting because this is what a lot of people think of as the first James Bond gadget. Now, first of all, inside this briefcase, James Bond carried a rifle that had an infrared scope in it. So that's pretty gadgety all by itself. But then the briefcase itself has so many hidden compartments and cool things that you immediately want one. So aside from the part that I'm pretty sure that

the weight limitations would start to be an issue. But it's probably a little weighty. It's probably a little heavy, Okay, so you got a rifle on it, so that's that's some weight. Right. That also has at least one, if not two knives in it, right, Um tubes for ammunition. Right, So these these brass tubes that carry bullets in them. They're not they don't shoot bullets, but it's a way to carry immunition inside a place without someone seeing that

you're carrying lots of ammunition. Write some some belts of gold coins. Fifty gold sovereigns is exactly how many were in that briefcase. Fifty. That's a lot of gold coin. Um. Each gold coin was well technically worth a pound sterling, but everyone used it as bullying. So then you've got the poisonous gas that's also inside the briefcase because it had that trick lid, and if it didn't know the trick to opening it, then it would go off. And yeah, so yeah, this is a this is a pretty cool thing.

And in one of those I actually saw a video online of a fan who created a replica of this briefcase. Using plastic stuff for all the weapons, so like you know, a little thing bullets and plastic, but it was it was incredibly faithful to the original design. That was really amazing. I'll see if I can find that video and a link it when we put this live. Awesome. See. They also had a both a radio phone in the car and a pager for bond, right, both of which were

technologies that existed at the time. But we're really only in US for like very high paid doctors, um state officials kind of stuff like that. Pages have only been around for a little while, maybe maybe about five years when when that came out, so it was still a very new thing to most people. They also used a bug detector. Now this was not the only time that a bug detector is shown in a Jay's Bond film, but we're not going to cover all of them, just

to say that this is very much spy tech. This is you know, when you can put something that's designed to get a surveillance from a specific area, whether it's a microphone or a camera or whatever. Bug detectors are a real thing. They detect different stuff, like you might have an e m F detector looking for electromagnetic fields, you might have a broad band radio scanner to pick up any radio signations. So this is totally something that happens in spy business, happening for for I'd say since

at least World War two. Yeah, and and and in fact you'll you'll hear us. In fact, I'm sure we've talked about it. Perhaps it was in UH. I think it was our skunk Works episode where we talked about how Locke and Barton would have these meetings with the government and they would actually sweep the room for bugs in a hotel. You know, it would be a hotel that no one knew what the location was going to be until it happened, and so this is stuff that

happens today all the time. Um. Then they had a special camera that hid a tape recorder inside of it so that Bond could uh could clandestinely records. It's funny because now our phones do this. They have both the you know, you can get an app that let's you record stuff, you can take pictures. So a lot of the technology back then was, you know, like, let's combine these two crazy things to make another even more crazy thing.

And tonight we have it and a lot of sci fi style miniaturization was going on in these films too. You know, at the time, the idea of a tape recorder that could fit into it a camera was pretty wild, especially to consumers for whom a tracks were kind of the new big thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, if you're looking at the regular reel to reel tape recorders, which were enormous, like the size of like a small television set. I mean, these are these were big pieces of equipment, So to

have a manatorized version of that was pretty incredible. Yeah. As for weapons, special gadget weapons, some of the bad guys had some cool ones. There was one had a shoe that had a dagger hidden inside of it, a little shootout dagger I guess, not shootout but retractable. You kind of like a switchblade for your foot, which seems like just a terrible idea of here, as clumsy as I am, I would injure myself. That's so quickly and easily.

Lauren accidentally brutally stabbed herself forty seven times while walking up the stairs. I know what would happen. Then one of the bad guys had a watch watch that had a wire wrapped around the watch face. So that you could you could pull it out like like, yeah, it would just it would just be long enough that you could strangle the heck out of somebody. And the bad guy tries to do that on Bond, but spoiler alert, it doesn't work. Okay, I can't believe you just told

us that. I know, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but uh, nothing about the garage watch was particularly like unusual. I do think that if you were going to try and hide a wire on yourself, you probably could find a better place than on your watch. I think you could easily sew it into a garment so that you could easily you know, whip it out of there or whatever, like you just had a little secret pocket or something. But hey, it's not as cinematic, so maybe that's the

whole reason. Yeah. Yeah, And actually the shoe dagger thing, um, the shoes that Michael Jackson designed to do that um that deep lean, Yeah, the one in a smooth smooth criminal right, um had sort of a similar mechanism of I mean, you know, not for it didn't shoot a dagger into the stage to hold him up, but but it did shoot out a little you could you could trigger a little hitch that would that would pop down from the heels I see hook into the stage. Yeah yeah,

oh cool. So so he wasn't doing that all on his own, no wonder. I broke my nose four times trying to do that move. Yeah, he was a professional hold patent and everything. If only a known then. So moving on in ninety four, we get one of the most famous James Bond films. That's one of the one this this is the one I always think of when I think of James Bond is gold Finger. Yeah. Yeah, Sean Connery is still with us, Yes, he's still the Bond. In fact, you know, Connerie does some jumping around. But

we'll get into him that a little bit later. But yeah, this is this is the of course, the famous scene in this one with the big industrial laser that's slowly going to bisect James Bond um and the gold Finger says, you know, James Bons says, do you expect me to talk to this? What? No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die. It's my favorite line in all of cinema. I think way up there that one. Leave the gun, take the Cannoli. That's another big one. But there you

know that's obviously not James Bond movie. So do we have industrial lasers that will bisect superspy? We have industrial lasers that could buy exact a superspy. I don't know that any have been put to that specific use. There may be some crazy villain out there who has in fact used it on a person. But we certainly have lasers that are powerful enough to do physical harm to a person at the time. I don't know that anyone to create a laser quite that powerful, but they do

exist today. It's but we use them for things like cutting steel, right, like using for for cutting cutting industrial uses. I mean it's an industrial laser. Well, if it could cut steel, I'm I'm pretty sure it could cut James Bond James, Yeah, I mean the guys he does. He does have abs of steel. He is a tough dude. We'll be right back with more from this classic episode of Tech Stuff Bonds with Spy Tech Part one in just a moment. It's a gold Finger was the premiere

of of one of these iconic James Bond items. Yes, are you talking about his vehicle? His vehicle, I said, an Aston Martin Masson Martin d B five to be specific. There there are other Aston Martins that appear in the James Bond franchise, and there are also other types of cars, but I mean some of them are most of them are ones that James Bond, you know, gets borrows. Let's say, for a short while. The Aston Martin is always associated as being James Bond's car, like it's something that was

heloped by Q and he drives it. I believe that they entered into some kind of like marketing agreement with the company in the nineteen sixties right around this film say and well, you know, and the Aston Martin is a luxury car company out of England. They are gorgeous cars.

And the company itself for a brief while was a subsidiary of Ford Motor Company, but was that was much later than in the nineties, for for like a few years, and then it was bought back that some some uh financiers purchased most of the ownership of the company back from Ford, which now I think owns a tiny share in comparison to what it used to have. But with all of the switching around, um, has it ever had

an objector seat? Uh? Yes, yes, the Acid Martin very well known lots and lots of gadgets on this thing, including the famous objector seat that is used in gold Finger. Um also machine guns behind had life. Yeah that's another big one. Tire slashing, hub caps, revolving license plates, uh, smoke and oil slick defense tools. So if you've ever played the old arcade game Spy Hunter, which had all of these sort of things and either on its car or enemy cars, it owes everything to this to this movie.

Also also Mario Kart I think, I mean it didn't have any banana peals their turtle shells. No, no, I mean if only they had a couple of red turtle shells, Bond would have just sailed right through all those problems.

Um that that flipping license plate thing, by the way, is a real thing in China, as if two thousand eight, Chinese police reported they were having a problem with with a lot of people installing these remote controlled plate changers that that only cost about like one four hundred bucks at the time, So that way they could they can drive under a fake license plate and then switch it over to a real one or something. Yeah, it's interesting to to avoid getting tickets. And also there was a

you know the Acid Martin. Although we do identify that very strongly with Bond in the books, it was a different type of luxury car that was used in most of the novels, which were Bentley's. Yeah. Yeah, definitely for the first few. Um, I'm not sure. I'm not sure if if if it's stuck with that for the whole thing. Yeah, but for the first like four or five I think, yeah, certainly before they started getting upgrades to them, because again

in the early books as well, they weren't so tech heavy. Yeah, that's true. Uh. And Bentley, by the way, also British car companies. Not a big surprise, is there. Yeah. Also gorgeous, it's not just like oh only Eventley also about this specifically. Listener Mike Goldenberg on Twitter asked if any cars with weaponry and objector seats exist in real life, and Okay, so the MythBusters did create a car with an ejector seat.

They cut a hole out of the roof of a car, they built the ejector seat, they put Buster in it. The whole rig weighed about three pounds. They calculated how much rocket power was going to be needed to eject it, and they put the rockets into the seat and they tested it and uh and Buster flew out. So everything's awesome, right, It works perfectly, aside from the part where it filled the entire cabin of the car with flames. Yeah, as

it turns out, it probably would burn you pretty badly. Now, granted, if you came up with some other objector method, like you had built some sort of super powerful air catapult, or if you had just a really uh strong spring that was held into place with latches that you could on latch, you might be able to eject someone from a car without filling the car also with deadly flames.

But that's I'd say it's probably a bad decision. Yeah, let's just say that it's not something you're gonna commonly find in vehicles, and spies do not usually drive around cars that have that. It's spies, by the way, usually don't drive around incredibly flashy sports cars. Yeah, it turns out those get attention just like we're just like, you know, always winning at the casinos. So but all right, So there are other some other gadgets and gold gold finger

that we should talk about. There's the homing beacons, which these are a thing. So the homing beacons and gold Finger, I think we're transmitters that they could pick up via satellite, which you know, not that unusual, I mean, other than the fact that trying to transmit a signal that can be picked up by a satellite is a little, uh,

a little challenging. But you know, now today we could totally have these kind of beacons, but they'd be operating on various wireless frequencies where you might even get GPS data from a satellite, but it's not beaming information back to the satellite. Instead, it's beaming information to somewhere nearby, right right. Um, As of the year that Goldfinger came out, GPS was actively guiding US Navy ships. But um, this

was called the Navy Navigation Satellite System. Instead of using GPS as we know today, it evaluated Doppler shifts in signal from satellites with precisely known orbits, and it wouldn't be more precise until we got into the kind of GPS that we know today in the nineties. And even then, I mean military obviously would have had access to the best of the best. It wasn't until the late nineties

that we started seeing that creep into markets. Where we could make real useful um, like, we could really take advantage of GPS, because before that it wasn't so accurate that you could do like turn by turn directions. They could tell you if you were in the general area, and that was the best at any rate. Homing beacons. I mean, there are plenty of things that can give off the signal that, depending upon how far way you are,

you can totally track it. So that's not that far fetched, although of course the ones that appear in the Bond movies tend to be smaller and more versatile than what you actually get in real life. And for specifically in nineteen sixty four, it was a pretty impressive, pretty impressive feat. Oh and also since we didn't delete this one, I have to bring it up. It's not really a gadget, but it is one of the early ridiculous examples of

Bond technology. Yeah, I'm talking about the the the camouflage wetsuit. What makes it camouflage? It had a rubber duck on top of it. Yeah, Bond kind of throws it away in disdain, but yes, it had. It was a wet suit with a rubber duck on it. I did not delete that from our notes, because um, I felt like it was really probably the most important of all the technology that we will be talking about. It's fair, it's fair, it's early, but it's fair. Alright, We're moving on to

nineteen six. This is Thunderball. Uh there was some tech in here that was definitely a little more uh far fetched, particular from the time. Yeah, they had a homing pill, which was something that bond could swallow and it had

a homing device in it. Being able to create a pill that would have a device strong enough to admit a frequency that you could pick up from any distance is problematic because where do you get the power source, which which is the problem with a lot of these very small gadgets that we're that we're going to be talking about, is really the power source capacity that even

today we don't fully have worked out. Yeah, we could miniaturize the electronics, but miniaturizing the power that battery technology has lagged well behind other technologies, and we all know this. It's one of the big challenges with today's electronics is that we can make incredibly powerful electronics, but often the battery has trouble keeping up with the pace. So that

would have been a big issue. A lot of the sort of stuff that you think of, like that the biomechanical type pills that doctors are using today to track things in experimental clinical trials are passive, and that you're using a giants system that can track the pathway of the pill. But it's because the giant system is sending in signals that bounce off the pill, like ultrasound or

something like that. So little tricky. Uh. He also has a rocket belt where he it's like a little jet pack and it allows him to escape after he kills a bad guy. And um, here's the thing. It was a real jet pack. It was actually based off of In fact, it was a bell Aero Systems rocket belt, and that was something that bell Aero Systems had developed for the U. S. Army specifically to let people do really short John. So I'm talking about like twenty feet.

You couldn't go very far at all, You couldn't go very high, and you couldn't go very far. Yeah. But but it used hydrogen peroxide its fuel, which was bizarre, and later ones used other types of fuel as well, but they never were terribly useful. It was very difficult to control their expensive Uh, there was a you know, obviously there was the risk of injury, so it was never anything that was adopted widely, but still kind of a cool sci fi thing to having a Bond fail. Sure.

Other personal um motion systems involved in this film included an underwater jet pack let him go through really fast? Yeah. Um, and you know, the pack itself was still a little bit sci fi at the time. I mean we we we have personal diver jet packs. Yeah, well maybe not jet not jet packs, but like little you know, those little motorized assistant things that allow you to really zoom through.

Yeah packs. Yeah, And we wouldn't have something quite that small until nine nine, so it wasn't that far off, right. There was a portable breather or actually an air supply is what they called it in the film, that would give just a short amount of air, like a couple of minutes worth of air that could be used either underwater or if say you were in a room filled with poisonous gas. You would actually see this in a call back in a couple of other Bond movies as

well as a Star Wars movie if I'm not mistaken. Um, But anyway, it was one of those things where um uh, you know, the actual spy agencies after they saw this, started asking hey does this exist, because we would totally use one of those, and it totally did not exist. Uh. This was a request, by the way, by David from Twitter,

so David, we totally wanted to cover it. But yeah, it's it kind of looked like two little CEO two canisters like you would see and if you ever saw one of those slot cars that use the CEO two as the propulsion. Yeah, yeah, it's sort of like a

like a cigar container shape. Yeah, the two small ones, and then they were they were they meshed together with a little mouth piece thing that you would just hole in your mouth, and there's just no easy way of handling that, like the pressurized air, which is kind of it would it would not be pleasant. Never put your mouth on a CEO two canister, is what I'm saying.

For one thing, you're gonna freeze yourself. For another thing, you're gonna suffocate, And for a third thing, your eyes might pop out of your head because that's a lot of it. That's a lot of gas going into you all at once. Important safety tip. Thanks Jonathan, You're welcome. Reminds me of that time when you try to draw a hole in your head. So there's also a cassette recorder hidden in a book, which is totally legit. I mean,

spies like a big thing in spite. Technology is all about surveillance and hiding things in mundane objects, like hiding hiding equipment in mundane objects. So not at all a stretch. Now, although again I'm not sure if in nineteen sixty murder murd mur Um whenever that second four thank you, I'm not sure if that if that level of miniaturization would have been possible. Yeah. So, and also they had the

skyhook system. Now this is super cool. This is the idea where James Bond has this harness and it can hook up to a line that's a tether. The other end of the tether is attached to a weather balloon. Releasing the weather balloon goes up. The balloon goes up into the air. It does not it's not enough to

lift James Bond. No, but Bond can then signal a local airplane and the airplane flies by and it's got a hook on it that hooks this tether and pulls James Bond off his feet, flying up through the air. And actually in this case he's got a lady with him, um, which is not a big surprise if you watch the Jay's Bond series and you might think, well, that's kind of cool. And I've seen that in other movies too. There were you know, there are other examples. Was uh

in one of the Batman films that was an example this. Yeah, and that's because it totally exists. Yeah, this was actually invented by someone we've talked about before, Robert Edison Fulton Jr. Now if that name sounds familiar, it's because you listened to our flying Car episode where we talked about how he was one of the early inventors of a flying car that never got off the ground. Um. And at any rate, I love it when you judge yourself for puns.

So he developed this particular technology for the c I A, so it was actually built for spies. So cool that it actually shows up in a movie and that it's, you know, pretty much the way it works with some some uh, they took a few liberties, but more or less it's the same concept. Then we get to you only live twice. In nineteen sixty seven, Now we got the what I called in my notes the killer cigarette thingy,

I believe that was the techn Colterman. Fact. Yeah, he's got a cigarette that has a projectile and it that can fire via rocket and it is accurate up to thirty yards. So I look to see if I could find anything like this. Um, there are some similar technology, has been nothing quite to the level of this. Uh. In nineteen fifty four, Nikolai Koklov, who was a sent by the Soviet Union at that time to assassinate a German anti communist agitator, was carrying a very interesting weapon.

It was a weapon design designed to look like a cigarette case, UM, but in fact it was actually a gun. It could fire. Depending upon which account you read it, either it either fired cyanide tipped darts, cyanide bullets, or a puff of cyanide. But at any rate, UM it's mood. Kokolov decided not to assassinate the agitator. He actually turned himself into German authorities, handed the pack, the cigarette case over, the gun over and UM sought asylum, So he was

essentially defecting. It was was a huge story at the time, um, Um And okay, so I mean they're there have also been single shot cigarettes, something that holds like a two caliber round that can be fired when when an operative pulls a string with his teeth. Yeah. Crazy, so so so it's realistic ish. They also he had a gyro jet rocket gun, which you might think, oh, well, there's

no way this existed, Except this totally existed. It's a little handgun that could actually fire projectiles that were rockets. It's not a bullet, you know, a bullet. When you fire it, a striking pin hits the back of the cartridge, it ignites the propellant. The gases that expand push the bullet out of the barrel and it flies through and it goes towards the target. In this case, it's actually a little rocket that the rocket fuel solid rocket fuel,

ignites and it takes off from the gun. Now, these were developed both by the Russians and the United States UM but never really became popular. And part of the reason was that they were not effective weapons at close range because they had very low muzzle escape velocity. Right, they wouldn't really reach full speed until they were about twenty five yards out of the gun. Right, So unless your target was twenty five yards are further away from you.

The bullet was not going to strike with the full impact. And you know, you can imagine this. It's just to mention a like, instead of a bullet fired from a normal gun where it's losing velocity as soon as the as soon as it starts to exit the barrel, this is the different because it's fuel is inside the bullet itself. It's propelling forward. Um. But it was not terribly accurate. It was not good at close quarters, so I mean that that didn't mean that it was really lightweight and

had no recoil, which was pretty awesome. We'll be back with some more spy technology in just a moment after this quick break. And we're back, and someone's not back with us. That would be Sean Connery. Oh yeah, because this is the first film, first James Bond film too that's officially in the James Bond Cannon that did not feature Sean Connery. Yeah. That This would be on Her Majesty's Secret Service from nineteen with George lassen By. And uh.

The reason for Connery's absence was because at this point he was becoming a big film star and could demand higher salaries and so he did. Yeah, and they said we'll go with someone else. Uh So some of the gadgets in this film included radioactive lint, which actually was kind of a brilliant idea in Away. It was Linda had been irradiated that could be planted on a target's clothing, like in a pocket or something, and because of the irradiation,

they would be able to track the movement of the target. Uh. They don't explain how they irradiated the it, or what kind of radiation it's giving off, or whether or not you've just doomed this person with cancer. Uh, none of that's explained. But the idea of being able to hide the tracking device in such a way that it would just naturally feel like someone's like part of someone's person yet. Yeah, that that that was what was really kind of interesting. Um,

they had a safe cracker device. It was this kind of look kind of like a chord that had a little grappling thing that would grapple onto the combination dial and slowly turn the dial and start to judge through either mechanical stress or maybe even the sound of the tumblers which numbers were the most likely to be the right combination. And it takes a really long time to to work in the film, but that's that's probably fair. Um, this it was. It was one of those combination devices

and it also had a document copying mechanism attached. Um, I mean clearly that's what I wanted all of my safe cracking tools. Yeah. I hear that that version it was supposed to be like a liquid tone or one, which wouldn't have been terribly useful in the field because if you tilted it then all this toxic toner liquid would come out of it. But at any rate, it was an interesting idea. Yeah. Yeah, And obviously, I mean, well maybe maybe not obviously depending on how much you've

read about Xerox Corporation. That kind of tech had been patented back in the nineteen forties, but as of the end of the sixties it was still the huge office sized ones that I mean that we still have around today. It wasn't something that you could fit into not at all all right, so you all, but something you could fit in an tash a case. Was the tiny camera that Bond used. Yes, Um, it wasn't even futuristic for

the nineteen sixties. Walter Zapp designed a sub miniature camera in nineteen thirty six and helped start up the Monox company to manufacture them. Um, it was definitely in use in World War Two by spies and uh yeah, it used to film about about a quarter of the size of thirty five millimeter film. If anyone listening still remembers what they're film looks like or even what film looks like.

What's also in thing is that this was originally that camera was originally made for luxury uh vacations, Like it was meant for rich people to take some put in their pocket and and ended up being that spies were like, that is something we want that one get us that one. Diamonds are Forever. So guess who's back with us now, Sean Connery. Yeah we missed him. So nineteen one diamonds are Forever. And now this one had some cool tech in it. There was a biometric fingerprint scanner in this movie,

which today our iPhones have as a screen lock. Yeah. Crazy that the FBI would only start funding the development of the real tech as of like ninetive. I think the first wide use of the system was in Japan in the nineteen eighties by the police force over there. But so so this was this was a few years ahead of its Yeah, and it was actually predictive technology. And you know, I have a laptop at home that has the little fingerprint scanner where you can log on

that way, so it's tots a thing, y'all. Also, there was a ring getting back into that, why are you grabbing so much attention for yourself? Mr bond Q gave James a ring I like to call him James a

ring that that would allow him. Yeah, it will allow him to manipulate slot machines using electro magnets so that he would always win, because that's exactly what you want from a casino staff to to notice that you're anyway, I guess it was so that people would take it get attention to him, so they come to him, so he doesn't have to spend all that effort tracking them down, you know, the way that every other spy in the world has to do. If I just make a big

enough nuisance of myself, they'll come to me. I just have to escape five or six unescapable death traps. And that's all good aside aside from logistic reasons, why why would this not work? Okay, so the old electro mechanical ones, I can't imagine slot machines. You mean, yeah, slot machines exactly, the old electro mechanical slot machines. I can't imagine having an electro magnet being able to stop it at a

specific point. But furthermore, today slot machines are using digital circuits to determine whether you won or loss, So electro magnets, and you could probably create electro magnets strong enough to disrupt the machine. Yeah, you could probably mess up that screen real good. But but it went, it wouldn't pay out. And also you would have very large men with no necks wanting to speak with you very shortly after you pulled that kind of stuff. Um, moving on to the

next film, Live and Let Die. Okay, So Sean Connery is gone and now the greatest James Bond in all of cinematic history, joins us. I'm not sure whether you're being sarcastic or not right now. And that's delicious, Roger Moore, we're talking about He's the James Bond of my childhood. He was James Bond when I was a kid growing up, so he is. I don't really think he's the best James Bond. I think I think the most of the Roger Moore films are ludicrous, but I also enjoy them

for that specific feature. So Live and Let Die had a couple of different weird jets in it. There was a Rolex sub Mariner watch that had an electro magnet in it. Now, this electro magnet didn't let James Bond win it at a slot machine and let him deflect bullets in theory, although James Bond immediately says this is totally not gonna work, and you know it totally wouldn't work.

You would not be able to create First of all, you would never be able to pack in enough power for an electro magnet in watch format to do anything to change the trajectory of a bullet tast moving projectile. Yeah, it's not. It's basically just not ever going to be Wonder Woman's wrist bracelets. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sorry too, because well, as long as I can still

have my Lasso of Truth, that's all I really want. Then, also, the watch was capable of acting as a buzz saw, which could cut through cable, and both of these things would require so much power that again, where do you get the power? Where do you where do you fit

a power source in something that's small. They could do this because if you're talking about a buzz saw, you need torque and speed to make that effective, right, So and and that's and that's a physics issue, I think, not a miniaturization issue the way that we've been talking about with Yeah. Yeah, I mean you could put a saw blade on the side of a watch face. I just can't imagine you being able to to turn it

fast manually stuff with it. R. That's true that they also had a special clothing brush that hit a radio inside of it. Um, which again not a big surprise. Surveillance Again, radio transmitters that are disguised as other things, that's totally a real spy thing. Um. They had a shark gun that shot pellets that expelled air at high pressure, which would make targets explode. I I don't know how that would work this, Yeah, this is another physics issue.

I don't I don't think that that's how How could you create a pellet that that's small enough to be fired by a gun and yet hold enough pressurized gas so that it could blow up a target and yet not explode when you fire the gun, Like even if you were able to pack compress air that tightly into that small of a package. If it's supposed to explode upon impact or not even impact, if it's supposed to embed into a target and then explode, I just don't

see how it would work. But maybe if it has, if it contains as small portal to another dimension like a wormhole, and that that dimension is just filled with highly pressurized gas, all objections are lifted. Thank you, Lauren. Uh. And there was also in that film, the Deadly Cadillac El Dorado. It fired poison darts out of its side mirrors. Yeah, there was one of the bad guys cars. I would like to think that that's exactly the El Dorado you would have won in Glengarry, glen Ross if you had

made the most sales that month. First prizes in El Dorado that shoots poisoned darts. I um, I don't know. I think I could use one of those in Atlanta traffic. I think I would enjoy it. I'll just remember there are places you're fired. The Man with the Golden Gun nineteen seventy four, still too more. Yeah, this this is the Golden Gun is one of those again, sort of those iconic things that you think about in the James Bond series if you're a fan of the full series.

The Golden Gun, it was a super cool concept, and of course the bad guy in this film was such a great marksman that it didn't matter that the gun could only hold one bullet at a time you had to reload after every shot. The gun itself could be disassembled, and each part of the gun was disguised to look like something else. The guns barrel looks like it's a pen, the handle looks like it's a cigarette case, the chamber the firing chamber is a cigarette lighter, and the trigger

is a cuff link. So you know, you take it all apart and suddenly it looks like regular stuff. This man of Gold also his belt buckle held bullets. That's that's both fashionable and yeah, um so this particular type of gun, I mean, obviously these parts you could in theory machine parts that look like this sort of stuff, and a lot of guns are meant to be disassembled. You'd take them apart, especially if you want to clean them that kind of thing. So it's not like this

is unheard of. However, you know, you wouldn't really be able to use these things, like they wouldn't have any utility outside of being a gun, because you couldn't build all that stuff in and it would be very very difficult at any rate. I can't I can't imagine. And you'd have to use materials that could withstand the pressure of a bullet, you know. I mean, you're talking about that rapidly expanding gas that propels a bullet, So whatever you're using has to be strong enough to contain that.

It's actually a terrible choice for that sort of thing. Yeah, it would have to like gold plating. It couldn't be made of gold. It would be a bad, bad choice. But but even even if if this golden gun could not exist, that kind of gun that is disguised as another object, like I was talking about that that single shot cigarette gun earlier, I also saw a single shot

lipstick guns that were popular with Russian spies. And also there was there's great when the both Russians and United States developed guns that were in the shape of pipes, like the kind that you smoke smoking pipes, and you would just take the little pipe stem off and with a quick twist of the pipe that shoots the one bullet and uh, yeah, it had to be really close for it to work, um, because it didn't have very good accuracy. Yeah. Yeah, I'm suddenly even even more afraid

of Matt Frederick than I have been previously. It's that's understandable. So then there is the solex agitator. This was a device that was part of the doomsday machine in The Man with the Golden Gun. In this case, it was a tiny little thing that could somehow harness huge amounts of the Sun's power and then devoted to something else, whether it's for energy or say a heat ray or laser. So, yeah, the soil x agitator is one of those things that

I wish we had. I wish our our solar technology was, Yeah, that would be that would be really nice. Wanted to blow stuff up, mind you, I just wanted to to provide innern Jonathan, don't don't maybe blow a few things up, all right. Then there was the a m C Metador car, which converted into a flying car with wings and jets. Uh. For more information on that, just listen to our flying car episode and we'll talk about all about how problems

with flying cars. That brings us to the last movie on our our list for part one The Spy Who Loved Me that was film with Roger Moore. Yet again yep, and this one is the one that, uh that kind of inspired us to talk about this episode when when the news broke this year about a particular vehicle that's featured in this movie. Uh, there were a lot of people who wrote in and said we should cover this topic. And so the Lotus Spree was the car in the

film that was able to convert into a submarine. Yes, I believe this was the first time that the Lotus was used in a James Bond film, and it would continue to be their their marketing partner for the next couple. Yeah. Yeah, it shows up at least one more, if not more than that. Although Lotus has never created a model that is convertible to a submarine, didn't stop Elon Musk from

buying it though. He bought it and said that as a boy growing up in South Africa, it absolutely captured his imagination to see this vehicle turned into a submarine. It also had torpedoes, land mines, machine guns and missiles. It could also blast out cement that could act as either a smoke screen underwater or completely coat the wind screens of other vehicles and obscure their view. And uh so the nickname for the car is wet Nilly. Do you know how much he spent? Nine hundred nineties seven

thousand dollars just under one million bucks. That's a problem. That's a lot of money. So that's a whole bunch of money. Um, if you're Elon Musk and you've just bought a famous movie car that in the movies can convert into a submarine, but in reality cannot convert into a submarine, what do you say, Um, screw it, I'm turning this into a submarine. That's exactly what he said. He said, you know what, I am a rich man

with lots and lots of of ambition. I Am going to turn this into a for real submarine, if that is at all possible. And I'm going to replace the drive train with a Tesla motor drive train, so it's going to be an electric vehicle. Um. Top Gear actually totally built out a replica Lotus and and it in fact worked underwater in that it moved under its own power and did not drown the driver for a very

short period of time while it was in testing mode. Um, there's a really I'll link it on on social there's a really terrific video. There's water actually coming out of the key ignition into the cabinet. It's not a good sign. And listener Thomas on Facebook road in about this one and uh and said, well, who doesn't want to be able to change to submarine when the Californian traffic gets too stressful? I agree. So a couple of other little

things that happened in this movie. There was one point where James Bond uses a ski pole that ends up being a gun that can fire multiple shots from the handle. I look at the pictures of this because I I don't remember. I mean, I've seen this movie, but it's been so long, I don't remember it this particular scene, but all the shots looked really awkward, like it would have been really hard to aim that particular gun. Skiing confuses and terrifies me to begin with, So I don't

think it's a very good plan. Yeah. They also had a special Saco Courts watch that had a teletape printer. Paco another big marketing partner with the James Bond series. At this point in time, it looked like labels like a label maker. That's the kind of paper that came out. It wasn't only paper, look more like a label maker, like a little not quite ticker tape the way that

it probably would have been. More like more like you know where the letters have been stamped, so they're raised up a little bit, you know, like that kind of old label makers. Even that's even more you wonder how how much paper could have watched hold and and if and if it's raised I mean, if it's actually embossed, then I mean that that requires a stamping. I mean that requires some kind of swing and purely Roger Moore's uh, left arm is hollow and has all the working technology

necessary to print on this stuff. They never explored in the movies. They don't tell you about that. It's just as clear, I mean good subtext. Uh and um. Also, there's a sud agent who had a cigarette that you could blow through and stun gas would come out of it. I love that there's like just this knockout gas that apparently all it does is render you unconscious, completely harmless other than making you briefly unconscious. That wraps up part one of tech stuff bonds with spy technology, we will

visit part two next week. Hope you guys enjoyed. If you have any suggestions for topic session tackle on future episodes. Maybe you think I need to take another look at spy technology, maybe there's something totally different, Well let me no. The best way to do that is on Twitter with the handle text stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y text Stuff is an

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