Instant Genius - The science of James Bond gadgets, with Kathryn Harkup

Episode Date: August 29, 2022

Kathryn Harkup, author of Superspy Science, talks us through the science of the craziest gadgets, schemes and fatalities in the James Bond series. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Alex Hughes, staff writer at BBC Science Focus magazine. This week, I'm joined by chemist and author, Catherine Harkup. She's the author of Super Spy Science, Science, Deaf and Tech in the World of James Bond. She explains the science behind many of the weirdest and most wonderful gadgets and villain schemes in the James Bond series. James Bond is well known for his gadgets, but how accurate were Fleming's ideas compared to what was maybe possible today? I think Fleming had a flair for some of the ridiculous things, but also some surprisingly practical things. What was surprising for me is how few gadgets are actually in the books compared to the films. So there's certainly the ideas of lots of gadgets, the suitcase or the briefcase that Bond has in, from Russia with love that's packed with knives and cyanide tablets and God knows what.

That was in Fleming's book, but it also materialized in the film. And I think once people realized how popular it was, the filmmakers just ran with it and just let their imaginations go wild. But certainly the very kind of source material, the early eye. ideas certainly came from Fleming and he did know his stuff. He was involved in intelligence during the Second World War and all kinds of devices and secret gadgets were developed and used for espionage purposes during that time. So yes, there is a kind of grain of truth at the heart of a lot of these things but I think a lot of it has just exploded with the filmmakers' imaginations. And as far as you know, do any of his maybe weirder gadgets or, you know,

the evil technology of his villains, have any of those materialized in sort of more modern-day society's times developed? I think one of the sort of classic gadgets has to be the laser that Goldfinger almost slices bond in half with. So in 1964, when the film was released, Lasers were very, very new. They were virtually unknown technology outside of specialist research labs. And they certainly weren't powerful enough at that time to slice through metal or a spy. So they would be now, although not in the way that it's presented in the film. So in many respects, the films are ahead of their time.

And perhaps maybe scientists, technologists are looking at these films and going, you know, that's not too far from the truth. We could make that if we tried. I wonder how much it is the fiction inspiring the fact rather than the fact inspiring the fiction. And as you mentioned a minute ago, Fleming had some sort of background in this area, but how much of his work was inspired by his experience

and was there maybe something where he had to go out and research the technology that's, used or was it maybe a bit more of a winging it kind of situation? I think for some of the smaller things, he maybe just, he winged it. He certainly tried to make it as accurate as possible. His novels are known for their detail and that's what people loved about them. So he did go to the lengths of writing to experts and asking them to check the details that they were accurate.

So, for example, the details on guns. one of the plots on Her Majesty's Secret Service, the plan to destroy crops and various animals with pathogens, he did actually send out to an agency that specialised in fact-checking for authors, and he requested information detailing how this might be achieved, even though he had some idea of what was possible from his war work. So yes, he did go to the trouble to get things right, but the kind of, I think he was quite happy to bend the rules

and just about make it credible for the benefit of his audience. That makes sense. A personal favourite Bond Gadget of mine, and I think we just, you have to get it out of the way right at the start. It's odd jobs hat. There's absolutely no truth there, right? It's a bowler hat equivalent of Captain America's Shield, meets a pinky blinders hat with razor sharp power?

I guess. I mean, in the book he talks about, it's a special alloy that's very, very tough, and it odd job demonstrates his hat, and it embeds itself into the wooden panel work in Goldfinger's home. In the film, it decapitates a stone statue. Now, I don't know if there is a material that could be strong enough, thin enough. If you get a nice thin rim to that hat that could put all of the pressure into a very fine point, maybe it's possible.

But it does seem rather ridiculous. But it is such a wonderfully obscure gadget that I think the audience just goes with it. And that's the point of most of these moments in the Bond films. It doesn't really matter. We know this is fiction. And as long as it's entertaining, we're happy to go along with it. Yeah. It's not just odd job out there with a knife sharpener and a hat.

It's just something you can accept. I think there is a bit more to it. And in the book, obviously, Fleming has time to discuss things, which the film doesn't bother with. It just shows this statue being decapitated. We know what the hat does. We can move on. We don't need to know the details of the alloy within the rim

and how he's been developing it with his scientists. Another one that I'm a big fan of his. Rosa Kleb from Russia with Love and she wears the shoes that have a hidden blade in them and obviously the blade in a shoe that isn't exactly unbelievable I'm happy to

go along with that one but I am interested is there are there toxins that could kill someone within 12 seconds is that more in the realm of unbelievably? I think we're pushing credibility with the dead in 12 seconds

I can imagine maybe unconscious or incapacitated in 12 seconds, but no, maybe not dead. So there are lots of poisons that could be applied to weapons. And that isn't a new thing for James Bond. You know, people have been putting poisons on arrow tips and swords for thousands of years. But it's just the poisons that have become more refined over the years. And the blades have been hidden in objects like shoes and God knows where else. In terms of the poison, It's poison itself in Rosa Klebs case, we're not given much information in the film, but again, in the novel, Fleming has much more time to discuss it. And he reveals in a later novel after from Russia with Love that in fact it was tetrodotoxin, which is a very well-known poison.

It is a nerve agent, and it is the poison that is found in pufferfish. So what it does is it incapacitates your nerves so that they can't fire anymore. And that means that your nerves cannot control your muscles so you can't breathe. And that's what eventually kills you. So you can collapse on the floor fairly quickly from being stabbed with tetrodotoxing if it's delivered straight into your blood supply. But you wouldn't necessarily be dead immediately. So a little bit of exaggeration and a little bit of speeding up for the benefit of the pace of the film, which I think is completely understandable, given the nature of the films.

Of course, yeah. It would be strange to feature a very long death from the toxins. And horrible. I don't think many people in the audience actually want to see the reality of poisoning because it takes a long time and it's very unpleasant. So, yeah, speed it up. We all know what happened and we can move on with the plot. Of course. Arguably, the housing market right now is not looking too good. So if people were to take a note from Your Own Live Twice, could they live in a gigantic volcano base? Is that a possibility if they're looking on right move or is it just complete fantasy of a James Bond villain? It's an interesting choice for Aller. I mean, it is grandiose. It's got all of the essentials that you might need, your own inbuilt power

supply and heating system and a self-destruct mechanism should you need to get the hell out of there when a British agent turns up. So it has a lot going for it, especially if you're a bond villain. However, volcanoes are rather unpredictable things. And if your volcano is active enough that it can suddenly go off when you want it to, then maybe it could go off and explode and erupt when you don't want it to. So it's a precarious position to be in. And while many of people live in very close proximity to volcanoes, they live on the slopes. They don't tend to live inside the volcano itself because there's all sorts of temperature issues and there's some quite toxic gases that are given off from volcanoes. So it's not exactly a comfortable place to be.

if I was one of Blofeld's minions, I would be organising a strike because I would not be happy with the working conditions at all. And just in terms of building your lair, I mean, it's going to be expensive. You're going to have to have all sorts of rubble is going to have to be moved out of that volcano interior to make way for your monorail and all of your weapon stores. It's not cheap. But it's not cheap. It's not practical. but it does have status. This is true, but I think if you're going to build volcano base

and then put nuclear weapons inside of it, it's not really the best system. No, health and safety doesn't seem to preoccupy bond villains overly. So if you're willing to overlook those obvious inconveniences and health and safety issues, then yeah, why the hell not? another one of the arguably pretty over-the-top villain tricks that's found in the James Bond comes from the Goldfinger films and the books, but it's a giant space laser. And putting the, you know, the obvious financial difficulties aside and the trouble that it would take

to get the laser out into space, could a mad villain actually create a giant laser that could shoot all the way down to Earth and take someone out? So Goldfinger in 1964 said that a laser could, it was a very special light because it could project a spot on the moon. So we know that this light can travel a long distance, even in 1964. And by the 1970s, when we're not satisfied with lasers inside layers, we've got to put them into space, obviously the technology has moved on and they're going to be more powerful. If you want to project a spot of light from out in space down to Earth, then yes, you might be able to do it. But if you want a laser that can not just shine a light on the ground, but it can penetrate through the atmosphere, through water, hit a submarine, heat it up to the point it's going to explode, I think you're going to have some technical challenges.

I don't think lasers are powerful enough to do that at all. Certainly, Blofeld uses a diamond laser because obviously diamonds are great and they have extraordinary properties. So we're supposed to understand that these extraordinary properties make an extraordinarily powerful laser. And that to a certain extent is true. Diamonds have been used to make laser beams and they are very efficient so they can give a very powerful beam, but we're not quite at the stage of exploding rockets from space. I'm glad to say. Yeah, it's probably for the best.

You mentioned there the use of diamonds, but they seem to come up all the time in the James Swan series. Is there a reason? Is there any sort of property that makes it so special, or is it just Fleming's maybe has a sudden interest in diamonds that you can't quite shake? Fleming certainly did have an interest in diamonds. So as illustrated by a whole novel devoted to them called Diamonds Are Forever. So diamonds in themselves are extraordinary things in that they have an awful lot of value

for what is essentially just a carefully or interestingly arranged bunch of carbon atoms. So in and of itself, the material that makes up diamonds is not very valuable. just the fact that it makes these beautiful gems, we give them value because we want them, or certain people want them. So the sale of diamonds is very high value. Because they are just collections of carbon, it also means that they're very anonymous. There is no obvious way to tell where a diamond has come from. and they're very small and they're very easy to smuggle from one place to another. So as a form of currency, they're very useful, particularly for the sort of criminal organizations that Fleming was inventing for his novels.

Aside from all of that part, Fleming also wrote a non-fiction book called The Diamond Smugglers, which was about the genuine diamond smuggling activities that went on from mines in Africa and how those diamonds. Simons were got out of the mines and then travelled further down the line and ended up in commercial use. So he had a genuine interest. In terms of the films, they look great. Everyone knows what they are. Everyone knows their high value. And so you don't have to do an awful lot of technical explaining around them.

We understand that they can be used just as a currency. So it's a very effective shorthand for the films to get across what's going. going on between these criminal organizations. One of Fleming's many descriptions of ways people die is for the use of electricity as a weapon. You know, is this actually an effective or even realistic tool, especially, I guess, in some of the ways that is mentioned, like electrocution through a pair of headphones? Yeah. There are some fantastic and surreal electrocutions dotted throughout the films.

There's the ones through the headphones, which is actually probably the more credible version of electrocution, certainly at least because the electricity is directed to a part of the body that is going to cause death most effectively, i.e. it's going to go through the brain, disrupt nerve signals within the brain, and that can result very quickly in death. Other examples, for example, the guy in the chair in, oh, I forget, oh, in Thunderball, so big executive meeting of Spectre, and someone who's been diddling the company books gets electrocuted in his chair. This is, you know, this is a method of execution that has been used in the not too distant past,

and it does kill people. It's not terribly efficient. It is extremely brutal. There are no words really to express how horrible it is to literally burn up a body through electricity because our skin is just a poor conductor of electricity. You have to force the electricity through the skin to actually get to the organs that can be disrupted

by the electric current. And so the damage that's done to the body and the experience of being electrocuted is horrific. So the films tend to tidy that up somewhat. We see, you know, someone arching their back, a bit of smokes and flashing lights, and it's all over. But yes, it has been used as a means of killing people and it does work. other examples in the Timothy Dalton film where someone falls into a tank with an electric eel

and again we see sparks we see smoke a bit of thrashing around and we know that that particular henchman is a goner this is possible electric eels can certainly give a powerful electric shock enough to kill someone or at least stun them stop their breathing so that if they're underwater they can't move and that would mean that they would die although not initially from the electric shock so yes there's always an element of truth within these depictions on screen they are always in rather convoluted scenarios but the basic principles yes electricity can kill you and in the methods that are shown in the film so it's a lot like the poisonings that it's possible but maybe we skip over some of the more brutal aspects of it.

Definitely. Yeah, electrocution is horrific. There's no two ways about it. So actually showing the reality of it on screen, I think you would have your audience rushing for the exits and passing out in the aisles. So no, of course you're not going to show that. But everyone is familiar with the idea of it.

So again, we just go along with it. As I'm sure you know, James Bond is, he's a big fan of the car chase. He loves an over-engineered classic car, build of gadgets, even more. But, you know, bulletproof cars and vehicles that smash through walls for these obstacle after obstacle, is that realistic or is that, you know,

the complete fiction that we're seeing in these films? It is, I think, again, an exaggeration of what is physically possible. So certainly you can bulletproof a car. If you layer up enough glass with sheets of plastic in between, then yes, it will stop a bullet. If you make your metal doors and the framework of your car with thick enough metal, yes, it will stop a bullet. Driving it around at high speed and cornering as accurately as they do in the films probably won't happen because these are going to be big, bulky, heavy cars. but, you know, artistic license. The fact that a lot of the stunts and the car chases that we see on screen are done for real

is an absolute testament to the filmmakers. The skills of the stunt drivers, the stunt coordinators and the stunt performers is phenomenal. They might wreck a whole car park full of cars in doing so, but they do do those stunts whenever they can for real. So yes, in theory, cars can do a lot of what we see on screen, but maybe not the same car consistently. Another vehicle that I think comes up in the James Bond films quite a lot is planes. You know, for the most part, they're pretty safe.

But for whatever reason, Bond, he just doesn't have the same luck as most people. No, I would not check in on the same flight as Bond. It was probably for the best. And many of the villains or the henchmen in their films, they've been sucked straight out the plane when a hole appears or a door opens while they're up in the sky. Is that what would actually happen if a hole was to appear in a plane or the door gets yanked open? Would you everything just be sucked out? Well, not to alarm anyone listening to this, but yes, holes have occasionally formed in aircraft

and people and objects have been sucked out. it is exceptionally rare and the vast majority of cases the airplane itself with the majority of its passengers still on board has landed safely. So there are a lot of health and safety and protection systems within an aircraft to stop what you see on a Bond film

from actually happening. So for example, the classic Goldfinger, the confrontation between Goldfinger and Bond at the end of the film there's a struggle, a gun goes off and one of the windows is shot out. Everything suddenly flies out of the window, including Goldfinger, who's squeezed out like a tube of toothpaste. The design of aircraft is very specific so that the windows that you have on them are not

big enough for an adult to actually fit through. What is most likely to happen is that any stray drinks table, or packets of peanuts, they might fly out of the window. But as soon as Goldfinger gets pressed up against the frame, he's going to block that hole and he's going to stop any more air and any other things rushing out of the aircraft. So the way it's presented in the film, again, it is an exaggeration. Like I say, there are all sorts of health and safety features

to protect passengers from that happening. Also, once the air has sucked out, because the air outside of the plane when it's at altitude is a lot lower pressure than inside the plane, once that pressure is balanced out, then everything just goes back to normal. Oxygen mask dropped from the ceiling.

Your pilots will get down to the ground as quickly as possible, and everything should be fine. Yeah, I guess once Goldfingers blocking at the wind, then everything's fine. You can just land with films. And he does that very effectively. He is a very good blocker of windows.

He would not continue to be sucked out as shown in the film. One of the, I think one of the more far-fetched felony plots in James Bond, which is maybe saying something, is the use of the nanorobots in No Time to Die. You know, nano-robots come up all the time in sci-fi, and supposedly these ones could, they could target certain people,

there's DNA and attack them specifically, then pass the bomb between people by touch. How close is that to actually what is possible? I'm guessing people really shouldn't be worried about nanobots in this sense. I wouldn't lose a wink of sleep over nanobots. Please don't worry about it. And I have to say, as soon as you said an outlandish plot, I was feverishly going through all of the Bond films to try and figure out where you were going to land on that one, because there are so many.

But the nanobots, yes. Nanotechnology is brilliant. It is phenomenal what scientists and chemists and technologists can achieve on the very, very small scale. But that's all nanotechnology is. It's just very, very small scale. And the smaller you get, the more difficult it is to get functioning objects, especially something as complicated as a killer robot that hones in on digital. DNA. There are, not to pick it apart, but there are lots of inconsistencies within the films. For

example, we are told that once you've got the nanobots, you can't get rid of them, yet they're very easily passed on just by the slightest touch. Well, can't you just then keep showering until you get rid of enough of them that they're not a problem anymore? I don't really understand the mechanism of it. I really wouldn't worry about. nanobots, they are not coming for you. I assume that would be the case. For some reason, I don't think it's just James Bond, it's films in general. They're absolutely obsessed with cyanide and based on its appearances in pop culture, you know, it can do everything from kill someone instantly, it can knock someone out, temporarily, it capacitate them.

What would that actually do someone if they ingested it? Or is it one of those kind of things that that no one really knows, and it's just randomly guessed at in films. I think part of the choice of cyanide is that it is a very well-known poison, and certain characteristics of it are also very well-known. For example, that you need only a very small amount to be fatal, and that it kills very, very quickly. That is just kind of generally known. So, again, you don't have to slow down your film with explaining all of that,

when you introduce cyanide into the plot. For films like James Bond, cyanide also has an association with spies and their standard issue suicide pill that they get given. And this has some credibility or some historical relevance. For example, in Second World War, pilots who were flying missions behind enemy lines were given L-pill.

and these little pills they were made of glass and inside they contained cyanide. So if they were captured, the pilot could bite down on these pills. The cyanide would be released and they would be killed before they could divulge any secrets to the enemy. And the cyanide was chosen for exactly the reasons that I outlined. You only need a very small amount and it kills very, very quickly. and it is very easy chemically to produce. There is not much to cyanide. The effects it has on the body, apart from being lethal and very small doses, depends on how much you take. So a small dose, you might be able to survive, but it would be probably quite unpleasant. There would be some

vomiting, headaches, disorientation. The cyanide itself can be quite quite unpleasant. The cyanide itself can be corrosive as we saw in Skyfall, but not quite in the way it's shown in the film. So cyanide, when it's in the mouth, it will be broken down to form cyanic acid, which you would think, okay, that explains half of Raoul Silver's jaw disappearing. We're not really, because the acid is actually very weak and it will do more damage to the tissue, the soft tissue within the mouth, rather than the bones. It's going to be unpleasant, certainly, and there will be damage, but just not in the way presented in the film. Again, it doesn't matter because the whole point of that scene is that for a moment, you actually

feel sorry for the bad guy. And it's M, the person we all love in the films, who has done the wrong thing or so it is presented in that instant. So it's very useful from the film's point of view. It's just not what would happen scientifically. And on a similar topic, one of the scenes in the film, Funderball, it mentions what they call a gamma gas that is it's oddly specific in its use. Is this meant to be something specific, like a real thing or is this just something that was maybe made up for the James Bond world. And the gamma gas that's used, there is a moment, it's used a couple of times in the film. And the first time it's used is kind of a test run.

So there's a pilot that needs to be got rid of so that a specter double can be put in his place and hijack a plane. To get rid of this pilot, what they do is they spray this gamma gas in the guy's face and he collapses on the floor. However, the person who does the spraying, who's literally just a few feet away, plus the other people in the room, none of them are affected by this enormously potent, powerful, highly toxic gas. And so this seems to be a bit of an exaggeration for the benefit of the film. However, watching this back recently, this film was made in, what, 1965, something like that. It made me think of a real-life case that happened much more recently.

And that was King Yong Nam, who was sprayed with something in the face when he was in an airport, and he later collapsed and died. However, no one else in the airport was affected, and it just seemed to be him. And this was because it is believed that a specific nerve agent was used. And the idea of this nerve agent is that you store it and you administer it in two parts. So one person goes up to your victim and sprays them in the face, and another person goes up and wipes a liquid from a cloth on their face. And then on the face, these two chemicals combine to make the poison and it can take effect.

Meanwhile, the two people that administer the two components are in theory fine. So perhaps in the film, before we see this guy being sprayed with a gamma gas, maybe there was something on a hotel towel that he wiped his face with, and the two reacted together and made something toxic that killed him, but left everyone else fine. So in a way, it was actually more accurate than I think perhaps the filmmakers intended. I think a good way to end is to ask what your favourite Bond gadget, evil villain world ending tool is, which is either the one that you deem the most believable

or the one that just sticks out in your mind as a personal favourite. Okay, it's probably going to be a controversial choice, but I will go with Gustav Graves' solar mirror because it's nuts. The idea that he has launched this huge satellite that when it spreads out this, big parabolic mirror. It focuses the light from the sun down onto the earth into such a powerful beam that it just destroys everything in its path. It is absolutely the grandiose nonsense that you would expect for a Bond villain. But it does have again a grain of truth. Apparently back in, I think it was the 1980s, there was a project to launch satellites containing

parabolic mirrors that would focus sunlight onto the ground, not to destroy what was on the ground, but simply to illuminate parts of the earth that didn't get much sunshine, just to extend the day, maybe just make living in those environments better. The project never really got off the ground. After the first satellite, it didn't deploy, the first satellite worked. I think the second satellite didn't deploy its mirror properly, it was all too expensive and it got shelved and they moved on to other things. But certainly the idea was there and what seems like complete nonsense in the film has that wonderful grain of truth that you think, well, maybe, probably not, but it is good fun.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was Catherine Harcup. If you want to know more about the science of James Bond, check out her book, Super Spy Science. The Incident Genius podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and newsagents, as well as on your preferred app store. Alternatively, you can come find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be looked at. lost through digital sources or poor signal.

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