Ian Fleming - The man behind James Bond

When the war was finally over, Ian Fleming told a friend shortly after the Normandy invasion, he was going to write "the spy story to end all spy stories." Less than 10 years later, he made good on the pledge with casino royale, an adventure tale featuring a motley cast from the espionage underworld and introducing a swashbuckling superspy by the name of Bond—James Bond.

A dozen novels and 20 films later, Agent 007's exploits have obscured Fleming's own remarkable career. Bond's creator may never have served in Her Majesty's secret service or toted a golden gun, but his stint as special assistant to Britain's director of naval intelligence during World War II supplied him with more than enough material for his books.

In 1939, Fleming was a newly minted, 31-year-old lieutenant in Britain's Naval Intelligence Division, assigned to collect information on enemy shipping. But when war arrived, writes Andrew Lycett, author of Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond, his group was brought into "covert activities outside its normal province." And Fleming—himself a gin-drinking bon vivant who just months earlier had been known primarily as a failed stockbroker—suddenly found himself coordinating clandestine operations against Romanian oil refineries, sending operatives to sabotage barges on the Danube, and brainstorming ways to cut off the supply of Swedish iron ore to Germany.

"War," writes Lycett, "proved his making," as Fleming demonstrated a knack for dreaming up imaginative schemes. Only a year into the job, he surprised and impressed his superiors with a plan to acquire one of the German Navy's code books. A captured bomber, Fleming figured, could be crashed into the English Channel near a German minesweeper. A crew of commandos on board would take to their life raft dressed as Germans, assault the enemy boat when it approached, and grab the code books. The plan was abandoned when no German ships appeared. But Fleming's flair for the dramatic was a hit with Britain's intelligence brass, according to John Cork, author of James Bond: The Legacy. They soon gave him free rein to conjure up clever new ways "to confuse, survey, and enrage the Germans."

Fleming's most enduring wartime legacy was an outfit called Assault Unit 30, a commando unit that specialized in capturing enemy documents, equipment, and ciphers in forward areas before they could be destroyed. Fleming's "Red Indians," as he called them, were responsible for several extraordinary missions, including capturing an entire German radar station in 1944—with its 300-man garrison. Some say the group served as the basis for the novel and movie The Dirty Dozen.

Through it all, Fleming served with panache. On a trip to Spain during the war, he was delayed in Portugal when he learned that only one airline, Lufthansa, had flights to Madrid. The company's German pilots at first refused to allow an enemy on board. But Fleming, through a Bond-like combination of audacity and charm, managed to persuade them that they had an obligation, as a commercial carrier, to fly him where he wanted to go. After the Bond novels appeared, the line between fact and fiction in Fleming's own career began to blur. He has been credited with an ever increasing number of wartime accomplishments—including meeting with Admiral Canaris, head of the German Abwehr, and conning Rudolf Hess, one of Hitler's deputies, into flying to Scotland in 1941. Most of the stories, however, remain unsubstantiated.

Truth be told, Fleming was deskbound for most of the war. But it was this very distance from the action that many believe allowed the creation of Bond. From his perch at naval intelligence, Fleming observed hundreds of spies, and 007 was their composite. "Bond," writes Lycett, "gave at least fictional form to Ian's frustrated urge to have been...a full-time secret agent, rather than a competent staff officer sitting, office-politicking and dreaming in Room 39 of the Admiralty."

Claude Shannon

Today we all use the internet, listen to the music, watch movies in digital formats and the space required to store it is so small that it would wa unimaginable in the past.

There is a constant exchange of information between people , on the networks and on the internet. This excange seems so obvious that we never think of what goes at the back of it to make it happen. This all seems to be an integral part of our lives now. All this exchange of information is due to the contribution of a single personality who established a relationship between mathematics and digital logic and laid down the algorithms and rules which dictate the terms which define the amount off space required to strore certain amount of information in the digital format and its tranfer limitation across the networks.

The information theory by Claude E. Shannon is comparable to the theory of relativity by Einstein but only it has the practicle proofs too. Shannon was also among the ones who helped in the devepoment of cryptography in digital form since the very days of its inception and was also a pioneer in the just started field of the Artificial intelligence.

The most inportant of his inventions was the ability to stroe in information in digital format which made the tranfer of information from one point to the other not only easy but much more reliable and less expensive. [The analog transmissions required amplifiers to boost the signals at regular intervals and the mjor disadvantage with that was that it also boosted the noise so the signal to noise ratio kept on increasing which remainds almost constant in the digital transmission.]

Shannon’s innovation helped boost the call quality and the distances it could reach and vrought down the price which took AT&T and Bell many steps forward at that time. He also proposed the idea of adding some redundant data to the actual data which allows for the reconstruction of the data if there is some loss of data at the recieving end. This is how we get flawless music and videos even fron the scratched discs.

Shannon had laid down these rules more thab 50 years back and it took such long time for the engineers and programmmers to implement these concepts. And as the time is passing by newer and better inplementations are coming into the picture.

Shannon also served his country very well by devicing methods to shoot down the German bombers as he developed algorithms for anti aircraft guns so that they cluld calculate the trajectory and shoot the bombers down.

Shannon was a fun loving personality. He was very much fascinated by juggling and some of his works includes the research on the Dynamics on keeping multiple objects in air simultaneously. He also helped NASA’s JEt propulsion lab in deep space communication. He also authored a book “Beat the Dealer” which made the casinos in Las Vegas change the rules for the game Blackjack. Shannon had many gadjets in his room which he himself stated as being useless.

Shannon did remarkable work in the field of mathematics and digital electronics but was never awarded the nobel prize the reason being that there was no nobel prize for mathematics. He however was awarded the Kyoto prize by Japanese constituted in late 1980’s which is considedred the nobel prize for mathematics.

Shannon suffered from Alzhimer in the last decade of his life and he finally lost his life to the ailment and left us all in February 2001. Shannon indeed was a knight in shining armor for the AT&T and BELL labs and many other communication giants like Qualcomm because of his work. Shannon is a legacy and if he would not have made the history then we still would have been living in history