#010: Walking Up Walls

The Mythbusters have used magnets to walk up walls:

On a MythBusters episode, we planned to scale a metal surface. I made aluminum hand and foot rigs (above) that relied on supermagnets that could hold up to 500 pounds each. To move such powerful magnets, I equipped the rigs with bearings that left a 1/8-in. gap between the magnets and the climbing surface. A nonskid separator at the bottom of the rigs kept me from sliding down. By lifting my heel, I could roll the rig with the bearings, one foot at a time. Then I found out the surface would be an air-conditioning duct made of sheetmetal-reducing the magnets’ pulling power to a few pounds. Although the sheetmetal didn’t support my weight for climbing, a thicker metal surface would work well. Jamie Hyneman

Via Popular Mechanics.

#007: James Bond’s Rolex

“Ah, Mr Bond, we’ve been expecting you!” But nobody ever expected Roger Moore’s Rolex to contain a hyper-intensified magnetic field.

It’s been called the coolest Bond watch ever, and we’d have to agree. Q Branch’s main effort for Live and Let Die was to fit a Rolex Submariner with a magnet “powerful enough to deflect the path of a bullet at long range.” A simple twist of the bezel activates the magnetic field, allowing Bond to protect himself from incoming fire.

Sheer magnetism, darling.