Sean Connery wears a Breitling Top Time

Q hands Bond a watch with a Geiger counter in it. "Useful and unobtrusive," he says. "The sweep hand takes the radioactivity count." The watch is a Breitling Top Time, and this is the first gadget watch in the history of the Bond franchise.

The film is Terence Young's Thunderball (1965). Sean Connery plays Bond. He has to find two atomic bombs SPECTRE has stolen from a RAF Avro Vulcan bomber and hidden underwater. The Top Time is the device that finds them - the chronograph's sweep second hand is rigged to register radiation.

The base watch is a Breitling Top Time, reference 2002 - a steel-cased pilot chronograph with a black dial, two white subdials, applied baton hour markers, and a tachymeter scale around the outside of the dial. The Top Time line was a newer, more affordable Breitling aimed at a younger 1960s market. Q-Branch modified one for Connery's wrist and never made another.

The prop watch then disappeared. For nearly fifty years no one knew where it was. In 2012 a man paid twenty-five pounds for a Top Time that had passed down from a Pinewood Studios worker, and brought it to EON Productions on a hunch he had the right one. EON's archivist Meg Simmons and Bond production designer Peter Lamont both authenticated it. Christie's sold it in June 2013 for £103,875.