stoked on tech

A friend, in the middle of writing a book, sent out a request. 

I need an example:  Someone does something very brave —– preferably using some kind of new technology —– in order to save someone.    The feat itself is quite educational, demonstrating the usefulness of new technologies, or whatever.    But that's NOT the point of the operation!    The point is saving the person(s) whose lives are in danger. 

My very first thought went to Bram Stoker's Dracula, whose subtext (lost to us now) is the dizzying array of new technologies.    Typewriters, gramophones, telegraphy, dictation machines, long-distance lines and transoceanic undersea cables, and (depending on how you define tech) shorthand. 

Those techs —– considered high-performance tech, enhancing the capabilities of the human as surely as wheels and flight —– are absolutely essential to the book.    This may be a bad example for you or a good, because to us these things are nearly invisible in our reading of the book.    But they would have been considered well-nigh gimmicky in 1897;  certainly I'll bet we could find a contemporary review that criticizes the reliance on tech.    The book virtually buzzes with technologies new to its generation. 

Nonetheless, and here's the flipside, the book has lasted and doesn't seem like antique science fiction to us precisely because the main thing is the main thing:  the laser focus on the damage the vampire is doing and could further do, and the importance of stopping him for good.

(And, for anyone who's never read it, consider this your command!    It's one of the most potent epistolary novels ever written, and absolutely riveting, not to mention that it fits perfectly within a Christian worldview, with several characters expositing on the Savior's role in the current crisis, and our duty to be like Him.)