KEN GRAHAM: FROM THE PUBLISHER

One of my tasks every evening is to find the cat and get him in the house. He’s an indoor/outdoor cat, but he prefers to sleep inside at night, even though he isn’t always ready to turn in when I am. And he’s the same color as the dead grass around our house, so he’s hard to find.

After a few fruitless searches around the property, I got the great idea of outfitting him with a GPS tracking device. That way, even if he was hunting mice in a dense thicket of brush, I’d be able to find him with my smartphone. If you can find your keys with an app, surely you can get one to find your cat.

I looked online, and they’re available. But the only ones I found include a transmitter that hangs from a collar and makes the cat look like a miniature St. Bernard, with a cask of bourbon under his chin. Boomer would hate that, so no go.

But I didn’t set out here to write about the cat. I want to talk about James Bond.

When I was researching tracking devices for Boomer, I remembered that gizmos like that have been around for decades. At least in the movies.

Near the beginning of the 1964 movie Goldfinger, James Bond and Auric Goldfinger (his first name is a latin term for gold) play golf. After Bond wins the match (by cheating), he sticks a device under Goldfinger’s gold Rolls-Royce, which allows Bond to track the car to Goldfinger’s hideaway in Switzerland. And of course, when Bond shows up there, mayhem ensues.

GPS satellites didn’t exist in the early ‘60s, but the writers of that move were certainly prophetic.

Another futuristic Bond invention came at the beginning of From Russia with Love, the movie before Goldfinger. Here we find Bond relaxing somewhere in rural England with a lovely young lady he met in the movie before that (Dr. No, which was the first Bond movie).

Bond and friend are out in the country, mind you, but we suddenly hear a phone ring. Bond untangles himself and walks over to his Bentley roadster, reaches under the dashboard, pulls out a phone and answers it. Remember, this is about 1962. The handset looked just like one we had in our house, including the spiral cord. (Yes, I was alive then, but just barely). But still, a phone in the car? Crazy!

(In case you’re wondering, Bond’s boss “M” was calling, and before we knew it, Bond was off to Istanbul, about to meet a beautiful young Russian spy, and the girl in the English countryside was completely forgotten. Technology is a mixed blessing.)

Not every futuristic James Bond creation has emerged as mainstream in later years. At the beginning of Thunderball, the fourth Bond movie, we see Bond escaping a harrowing situation by flying away in a jet pack, which is just what it sounds like: a backpack with vertical jet propulsion. Best of all, when he lands next to his Aston Martin, another beautiful woman is waiting for him, and his hair isn’t even messed up.

Bond had plenty of low-tech gizmos as well. The Aston Martin could dump oil out of its trunk onto the road if it was being chased. (The EPA didn’t exist then.) And, on the passenger side, it had an ejector seat with a giant spring: perfect to rid yourself of carjackers, and spouses who talk too much.

Until cat tracking devices shrink to the size of guitar picks, I guess I’ll just keep going out every night looking for Boomer. If I only had a jet pack.