James Bond movies have it all. Bond invariably saves the world, seduces beautiful women, and plays with the world's most innovative gadgets. Some of those gadgets from the movies are on display at a new exhibit titled 007 Science: Inventing the World of James Bond at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. They include a Bell Rocket Belt, the jetpack that Bond used to escape after he killed a target in the 1965 movie Thunderball.
When the movie was filmed in 1964, the stuntman flying the jetpack wasn't just a stuntman, he was Bill Suitor, test pilot for the Bell Rocket Belt who worked directly under its inventor Wendell Moore. Suitor knew the jetpack's limitations. It carried enough fuel to fly for exactly 21 seconds, and if you weren't near the ground when the fuel ran out, you were in trouble. When Suitor donned the jetpack on the set of Thunderball, he put on his helmet for the flight. The production team didn't like that at all, since they had already filmed Sean Connery's closeups for the jetpack sequence, and he wasn't wearing a helmet. Suitor knew the danger involved, and wasn't going to give in. Read about the innovative Bell Rocket Belt and the way it was filmed for the James Bond movie at Smithsonian.
