Gizmodo has an interesting interview with Ralph Osterhout, a man who builds spy gadgets for a living, interview by Sean Hollister.
As a boy, Osterhout was so enamored with Ian Fleming’s Bond novels that he decided to become a spy himself. He trained himself to shoot, drive, fight, even build his own weapons and gadgets. He studied the Bond films and, at the age of 22, built his own miniature submarine like the ones in the Bond classic Thunderball. He started a company building high-tech dive gear, and traveled around Europe to visit the exotic Bond locales he’d read about. “I stayed at the same hotels, went to the same restaurants and villages, smoked John Player No. 10 cigarettes,” he once told Wired.
That’s roughly when the US government came calling. They needed Bond-grade gear for their elite Navy SEAL divers. Soon, Osterhout was a military contractor who trained with SEALs in his spare time. He built closed-circuit rebreathers and thermal protection systems, which could let divers target Soviet nuclear submarines—in freezing waters, no less—without being spotted. Later, he designed the standard-issue PVS-7 night vision goggles used in Desert Storm, and later Afghanistan and Iraq. And yes, his dive vehicles eventually featured in two Bond films:Never Say Never Again, and The Spy Who Loved Me.
PVS-7 night vision goggles designed by Osterhout
Osterhout’s love of gadgets extends beyond the theater of war. He invented some of the most popular toys of the ’90s, including the Yak Bak, the TalkBoy F/X+ and the gadget-filled Power Penz. But after the dot-com crash he went back to building more secretive tech again.
Gizmodo: How did you get started?
Ralph Osterhout: I think I read all the Ian Fleming novels when I was probably 12 or 13 years old. I thought “I’d like to do that.” Just imagine if you had those kind of skills. So I set about making myself an expert in a multiplicity of weapons, martial arts, driving skills, you name it. From racing cars to motorcycles to making weapons to becoming an accomplished gunsmith.
If you want to know to become an expert in something, you go find someone who’s the best of the best. It’s not illegal or immoral to be friendly. If you’re honest and open and say “Look, I think what you do is fascinating, but I’m dumb as a post and I’d love to know more about it,” most people who are highly accomplished in more sensitive things will basically shoo you away—until they realize that you’re friendly and relentless and deeply interested in becoming skilled. The Achilles’ heel of most highly skilled people is that, as they get older, they like to find a younger reflection of themselves.
I knew that and identified it early on, and associated myself with world-class gunsmiths and martial artists and people who were highly skilled in shooting and all those things, and became virtually accomplished in all those things without anybody knowing. It wasn’t for anybody else and it wasn’t for show.