If you ’ve ever watched aJames Bondfilm ( or understand the account book ) , you ’ll know of Q , the quartermaster who administer agent 007 his high - tech gadgets , straddle from inconspicuous railroad car to tiny pipes that countenance you to emit underwater .

You may not be aware that he wasbased on a real person : Charles Fraser - Smith , the supplier of all things gismo - y to Britain ’s Special Operations Service during World War II . The cosmos of such gadgets in the agency dates back even further still .

However , some of the invention and gadgets provide by   the British spy bureau now known as MI6 were n’t quite how they were novelise inBond . For illustration , we never gravel a tantrum where Q calls Bond into his office and say " James , see this average playpen ? Well take it like so , twist and take out off the end , now I want you to obtain an hard-on , excite yourself for a while and blurt out into this bit here , " but this was the gist of a very real ( if curt - exist ) invention : the cum pen .

The first director of the then - Secret Service Bureau ( rebranded as MI6 in WWI )   was Sir Mansfield Smith - Cumming , who headed up the office from 1909 and eventually inspired the character of M. During WWI , Captain Cumming wanted to bump a way for spies to on the QT put across and in 1915tasked   scientists at London Universitywith finding a new type of invisible ink . In the meanwhile , one of his spies   – and good lord , we do not need to know how   – discovered that he could make his own invisible ink by applying his own semen to the page .

" Secret inks were our stock and trade and all were anxious to obtain some which came from a born source of supply . I shall never blank out [ Captain Cumming ’s ] delight when the Chief Censor [ Frank ] Worthington come one day with the announcement that one of his stave had find out that semen would not respond to iodine vapor and recite the man that he had had to remove the inventor from the office immediately as his colleagues were making life intolerable by accusations of masturbation , " one of his officerssaid of the discovery .

" The Old Man at once asked Coney Hatch [ lunatic mental hospital ] to mail distaff eq for testing and the slogan fit round the post — every world his own stylo [ pen ] . We thought we had solved the problem . " ( The discoverer ’s move end up being permanent as he was mocked so much by the other broker . )

Though the new ink was effective ,   there was a problem with it . It turns out that if you slander semen onto a alphabetic character and then send it via position or pigeon , upon reaching a twenty-four hours or so afterward it absolutely stank .

" Our adult male in Copenhagen , Major [ Richard ] Holme , evidently stocked it in a bottle , " the officer continued . " For his letters stank to high heaven and we had to tell him that a tonic functioning was necessary for each alphabetic character . "

So there you have it . British spies were actually encouraged to masturbate afresh each sentence they wanted to send a secret alphabetic character in inconspicuous semen ink . If Fleming had incorporated this into his stories no doubt Bond would have had much less DOE to give to chasing charwoman .