Are any of Bond's Q-Branch Gadgets Real?

Rafer Guzman - Newsday Inc.

Half the fun of watching a James Bond movie is in paying a visit to Q-Branch, the impossibly advanced technology department that produced nifty gadgets like the exploding Parker pen, the Omega watch that fires a laser beam, the surfboard with the watertight hidden compartment and the ever-popular jet-pack. They were marvelous, clever, enviable inventions - but were any of them real?

Actually, many were, according to Lois Gresh, co-author of "The Science of James Bond," a book that distinguishes fact and fantasy in the long-running film series. A writer on science, technology, engineering and math at the University of Rochester, Gresh will speak at Hofstra's James Bond symposium today.

"The vast majority [of Bond gadgets] is real technology ranging back through the world wars," Gresh said. "The other component is just this outlandish, crazy stuff that's just impossible to do in real life."

The Russian Lektor decoding device in 1963's "From Russia With Love," which looks like a souped-up adding machine, is a close cousin to the keyboard-driven Enigma decoder the Germans actually used during Word War II. The artificial fingerprint membranes that Bond wore in "Diamonds Are Forever" (1971) are quite real, Gresh said. And a computer device much like the one Bond uses to get past a combination lock in 1995's "GoldenEye" had already been publicized before the film's release.

What about the evil plot to irradiate Fort Knox's gold in 1964's "Goldfinger"? The actual result, Gresh said, would be liquid mercury. Equally absurd is the deadly gold body-paint that suffocates a woman in the same movie. "We don't breathe through our skin," Gresh said. "It would probably give you a rash." And the toxin bombs in 1979's "Moonraker" that kill humans but not animals or plant life? "There's no way," Gresh said.

Gresh expressed disappointment that the recent, more realistic Bond film "Casino Royale" dispensed with Q and his wizardry. "I think everyone has loved James Bond's techno-devices and gadgets as much as the cars and the girls," Gresh said. "Well, maybe not the girls."

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