On Her Majesty's Secret Service Gadgets
Photocopier

It took a crane and a giant case to get it to him, but Bond Is equipped with a supersized safe cracking device – what was wrong with the pocket sized version from You Only Live Twice is questionable, but we will leave it at; safes were much harder to crack by then and needed heavy duty kit to do the job.
Oh, hang on a minute – that wasn’t all that was in the case. He’s only gone and got himself a photocopier!
James Bond, filing clerk doesn’t quite have the right ring to it, so we will settle on the advanced nature of the technology.
Although, again - we do have to wonder why our super spy didn’t just whip out the little Minox camera that Peter Sellers used in Casino Royale - Especially as Q had already brought up the subject of miniaturisation.
You wouldn't mind, it's not as if 007 didn't own one - he whips it out later in the film. Oo-er.
Oh, hang on a minute – that wasn’t all that was in the case. He’s only gone and got himself a photocopier!
James Bond, filing clerk doesn’t quite have the right ring to it, so we will settle on the advanced nature of the technology.
Although, again - we do have to wonder why our super spy didn’t just whip out the little Minox camera that Peter Sellers used in Casino Royale - Especially as Q had already brought up the subject of miniaturisation.
You wouldn't mind, it's not as if 007 didn't own one - he whips it out later in the film. Oo-er.
The Safe Cracking machine aspect of the package was an electro-magnetic device that connected via a cable that had a magnetic plug to fit over the lock. The machine spun through the permutations before guessing the numbers. Yes, guessing. Computers were more advanced back then.
This is why we are skipping onto the far more remarkable piece of kit it was connected to - The Photocopier. Duplicating machines had existed for number of years. Versions included, mimeograph machines, carbon paper, Verifax and Photostat, but it was Xerox that brought us the first Xerographic Office Photocopying Machine in 1959. Chester Carlson had invented the earliest version as far back as 1938, but the lack of development of his system saw him turned down by over twenty companies, including IBM. A small company called the Haloid Corporation did license the machine and a bit of further development later plus a company name change, and we had the Xerox Corporation. The most significant benefit of the technology is the reason why it was developed further and survives to this day. The main form of office 'photo-direct copying' utilised Kodak's Verifax system, but the cost was around five times the price of a Xerox print in 1969.
007's use of a portable version of this new and soon to be industry standard method of copying office documents as technologically on time. As the technology has developed further, home office Printers now double as Photocopiers and Scanners. |
Photo: On Her Majesty's Secret Service 1969 Danjaq, LLC, & United Artists Corporation. All rights reserved