Ahead of Their Time

The pager
In From Russia with Love released in 1963, Bond carries a pager that beeps off alerting him that Universal Exports (the cover for MI6) is trying to contact him. Big deal, today’s mobile readers might contend! The catch is that the term "pager" itself was first used in 1959, referring to a Motorola radio communications product and the first consumer pager (as we know it) was Motorola’s Pageboy I, introduced in 1974, nearly a decade after 007 used it.

Submarine communication
In For Your Eyes Only (1981), the ATAC (Automatic Targeting Attack Communicator) was a device that used an ultra low frequency coded transmission to order submarines to launch ballistic missiles. Communication between submerged submarines and radios on the surface had been one of the biggest challenges of military engineering in the 20th century. Around the time of the release of the movie, a stop gap solution was discovered by using ultra low frequency transmission.

The car phone
In the same movie, Bond uses a sleek car phone to talk to MI6. The crux is that the first car phone was released in Stockholm in 1956 and it was the size of a suitcase and weighed 40 kilos. No such clunky gadgets for Bond! Also, the commercial first car-phone service, was introduced in Britain in 1965, a good 12 years after the release of From Russia with Love.

Reusable rockets
In the You Only Live Twice (1967), the infamous SPECTRE possessed a reusable rocket called Bird 1, which stood 65 feet tall and took off like a conventional space rocket, and landed on four retractable pedestals. At that point of time, the idea of a reusable rocket seemed like a joke but the NASA working prototype designed in the mid 90s has a striking resemblance with Bird 1.

In-car GPS
In Goldfinger (1964), Bond’s favorite Aston Martin DB5 is equipped with an onboard radar screen for tracking a large homing device with a range of 150 miles. It can safely be considered as the precursor to GPS and in-car navigating.