Things We Have Now That Star Trek Invented

5. Tricorders

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Having something that scans the area around you and tells you information that you need about that area doesn’t quite exist yet, although we are getting pretty close. What we do have is devices like the PDA, the Blackberry and the iPod/iPhone.

These wonderful little devices have screens that display to us information we access from the internet, much like a tricorder would in Star Trek. When they needed information, they would call it up on a tricorder and see it on a tiny screen, no different than we do with our handheld devices today. Given how far these devices have come, it should be no surprise that pretty soon they will have sensors.

6. Plasma Screens

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In the days of the original Star Trek series, televisions had small screens and the quality was not very good. The concept of the Enterprises’ view screen was amazing to many people who wished they could have a television as large as what was on the Enterprise. Before Star Trek, spaceships used windows at the front, but with The Original Series, a video screen became the norm for many science fiction shows and movies. These days, more and more plasma screens are hitting the market and the price is falling. The days of the old tube television are now disappearing as people get their own large view screens in their home. Screens these days hit about 50 inches before they become too pricey but it won’t be long before 100 or 200 inch plasma televisions turn the walls of our homes into view screens. Thanks Star Trek!

7. Cell Phones

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Probably the most famous invention to come from Star Trek is the cell phone. In the days of Star Trek: The Original Series, Captain Kirk and the gang would use a communicator to speak with each other simply by opening it and hailing someone by saying their name into the communicator. This may have seemed far-fetched considering at the time rotary phones were the most common phones in the world.

It was Martin Cooper, an employee of Motorola, who invented the cell phone. When asked what was the inspiration for the cell phone, he is not shy of saying Star Trek’s communicator was what started the gears in his mind moving. Only four years after the cancellation of Star Trek, the first portable cell phone call was made. Just over 20 years after the Original Series debuted, one million cell phones were in use and it just exploded from there. These days there are hundreds of millions of cell phone users across the planet and cell phones are now pushing the old land-line phone into museums. Our cell phones these days are more than what the communicator of Star Trek was considering we can now take photos, access the internet, use GPS and keep track of everything in the PDA functionality of our smart phones.

There really is no denying the fact that Star Trek did indeed invent the future as we know it. Plasma television, GPS, cell phones, personal computers and more all came from this simple series that was canceled after three years and went on to change the world.

Author: Craig Baird — Copyrighted © roadtickle.com