Innovations inspired by Star Trek
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In the latter part of the 20th century, budding scientists had it far easier. They had Star Trek for inspiration. From warp fields to flat-screen TVs, Star Trek boldly took its viewers where no programme had taken us before. Among those fans, of course, were the inventors, scientists and all-round boffins of today.
As the new Star Trek film prepares to land at a cinema near you, it’s time to take stock of some of those “far-fetched” ideas that we now take for granted.
Now, could someone get to work on synthehol, please?
NEC mobile
1 The flip-top mobile phone For a generation that grew up flicking imaginary communicators and saying “Beam me up, Scotty”, the now near-ubiquitous flip-top mobile phone was the answer to our prayers.
2 The sound of automatic doors The first electrically operated sliding automatic doors were fitted in Texas in 1960. They ran on noisy rubber wheels. Fifty years later, all of the world’s sliding doors open with a swooooosh. Where do you suppose that idea came from?
3. Flat-screen TVs, touch-screen computers, video-conferencing We laughed when we saw them. Television sets could never be that small, computers could never be that responsive. In 2009, we’re all fighting over the latest half-inch thick Sony and Samsung LCDs, then wondering how we plug our iPhones into them. Business types, meanwhile, are conducting transglobal negotiations in much the same manner as Kirk did with the Klingons.
Enterprise shuttle 4. The first space shuttle Nasa called its first space shuttle (above) the Enterprise, following a letter-writing campaign by fans in 1976. The ship was used in test flights but was never truly spaceworthy.
5. The transporter beam Although the original owes its existence to the show’s minuscule budget, that hasn’t stopped real scientists from trying to make one. In 2007, a new record was set for quantum teleportation, when data was beamed 89 miles from the island of La Palma to Tenerife.
6. The tricorder Dr McCoy’s original all-in-one medical diagnostic tool was designed by one of the unsung heroes of Star Trek, Wah Ming Chang, who also came up with the look for the Communicator. Although no such thing yet exists, we take heart from the fact that every single PDA on the planet looks like a Tricorder, and from this news article, which claims that PDAs can now be made to work as full-on medical scanners.
Jet injector
7. The Hypospray You try and tell me that there’s no Star Trek influence in the final design of jet injectors, the special hypodermics used for mass immunisation programmes. Go on, try.
8. Warp drive On the face of it, this is one of Star Trek’s most unlikely technologies. However, it does have roots in quantum physics, in which components of an atom do hop from place to place without, seemingly, touching a point in between (see the excellent book Quantum by Manjit Kumar for details). Yes, I know. It puzzled Einstein, too. And it seems to have defeated NASA, whose six-year Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program was cancelled in 2002. Unless, of course, they succeeded. And fell through into a parallel universe.
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9. The phaser Yep, it’s the US military again, and they've got a big laser gun.
If you have more classic tastes, then you can take apart your PlayStation 3 and turn a plastic toy phaser into the real thing. Just like the man in the video above.
Cloaking
10. The cloaking device According to a 2007 report at Networkworld.com, Purdue University engineers have created something that looks like a spiky hairbrush that has the ability to “bend” light around any object being cloaked. We are told to expect an invisible tank by 2012. Above is how we imagine it will look in the dark.
For more on the new Star Trek film, head to the Blockbuster Buzz, or read the full Times review.