THE FUTURE OF GADGETS IS NOW

FROM COMMUNICATORS TO TALKING COMPUTERS, STAR TREK TECH OFTEN ANTICIPATED—OR EVEN INSPIRED—REAL-WORLD ADVANCES

BY THOMAS E. WEBER

The tricorder, a handheld instrument carried by Enterprise crew members, has inspired a race to create a real-life sensor device that could gather information about the world.

IMAGINE FOR A MOMENT THAT YOU HAVE THIS FAR-OUT FUTURISTIC gadget from the minds of science-fiction writers: a communications device small enough to be carried in a pocket or clipped to a belt. By activating it, you can speak to someone else practically anywhere on the planet, conducting a conversation with crystal clarity. The devices are ubiquitous, relied upon every day to keep people connected.

Of course, you don’t have to work at all to imagine it. The device is called the cellular telephone, and it has been commonplace for 20 years now. But put yourself in the mind of a TV viewer sitting down to watch Star Trek in 1966. Earlier in the day, you thought about calling your friend from childhood who now lives a few hundred miles away, but you decided to wait until the weekend—it costs a lot to make a long-distance call, and rates are cheaper then. When you wanted to call home on the way from work to ask if there was still enough milk in the refrigerator, you had to pull the car over, find some change, get out of the vehicle and use a pay phone. But then you saw Capt. James T. Kirk whip out his Starfleet communicator and flip it open: “Kirk to Enterprise.” No cords, no coins—just an instant connection.

Though much of the key science in Star Trek, like faster-than-light space travel and transporter beams, appears forever out of reach, when it comes to the show’s gadgetry, the opposite has been true. Life in the 23rd and 24th centuries has consistently been outdone by things back here in the 21st. Computers that talk, digital libraries that can be accessed from anywhere, “replicators” that can create objects out of thin air—they’ve arrived far ahead of schedule. But of all the prescient Trek tech, it is the realm of communications that shows most clearly just how quickly the make-believe future can become real.

In 1973 Martin Cooper was an engineer working at Motorola, a big electronics company. He had a very terrestrial problem: telephone communication in the U.S. was controlled by “Ma Bell,” the AT&T monopoly that would eventually be broken up following a government antitrust case. The idea of cellular communication—a network of many radio transmitters and receivers that creates “cells,” or sub-regions, rather than relying on one massive central antenna—had been kicking around for a while. One advantage of the approach was that any portable radio talking to the cell network didn’t need to be unreasonably powerful. With one or more antenna sites in relatively close range at all times, it was feasible to create a reliable radio link with a small, portable device over a wide area. Ma Bell didn’t seem that interested, though—it focused on radio telephones for automobiles, seemingly convinced that this service was mainly of use to a fairly small group of people whose jobs kept them in their cars for most of the day.

To Cooper, though, this cellular technology looked like nothing less than the future of telephones. “For a hundred years we’d been trapped in our homes and our offices by the copper wire, and now we were going to be trapped in our cars,” recalls Cooper, now 87. From his work on the burgeoning pager industry, he believed that millions would grab at a better way to stay in touch on the go. “The freedom that you get from personal communications—we had demonstrated that over and over again,” he says. So he and his Motorola team produced a prototype handheld mobile phone that year. It would take years for it to evolve into a commercial product, but the future had been set in motion. The car phone would eventually become a relic, and the cellphone—still the size of a brick when wielded by Michael Douglas in the 1987 film Wall Street—would put a wireless communicator in everyone’s pocket.

This, then, really was Star Trek brought to life. As phones got smaller, they got even Trekkier. Motorola’s 1989 MicroTAC phone had a flip-open lid (though it flipped down, the opposite of a Starfleet communicator). In 1996 came the phone certain to stir love in any Trekker’s heart: a small, flat object that could be flipped open with the flick of a wrist, just like Capt. Kirk did. Motorola called it . . . the StarTAC.

The notion that Cooper was inspired by Star Trek has taken on mythical proportions, aided in part by his appearance in a 2005 documentary, How William Shatner Changed the World, which suggested that a Trek episode set off that little lightbulb of imagination above his head. Looking back now, Cooper says the legend has become a bit exaggerated—after all, he was steeped in the technology of communications through his work. And for fictional inspiration, he had an even earlier example: the wrist radio worn by comic-book detective Dick Tracy starting back in 1946. Still, he says, those Starfleet-issue communicators looked pretty good to him. “I’m a science-fiction fan,” Cooper says, “and I would not suggest that Star Trek wasn’t an influence.”

Cellular telephones, it turns out, were just the beginning. The bigger the market for personal communications has grown, the more Star Trek’s onscreen gadgets have come to seem positively prophetic. Consider the wireless earpieces used aboard the Enterprise. Stuck into an ear, these cylindrical silver devices let Lt. Uhura hear incoming transmissions while keeping her hands free to operate the controls at her station. In 1994 a Swedish telecommunications company introduced a short-range wireless technology designed to link nearby components. It was called Bluetooth—and now it’s everywhere. It has become the enabling protocol for a wide range of computer and phone accessories, including tiny wireless earpieces that make Uhura’s 23rd-century version look antiquated. They sell for $20 or less.

On the ship, Kirk’s crew often turned to video communications. The other party could be seen on the main viewscreen of the bridge or on smaller desktop displays. A three-sided unit in the Enterprise briefing room facilitated videoconferencing. Today, that capability is commonplace—whether it’s an elaborate ­conference-room setup at a business or the ­Skype and FaceTime software that runs on computers and phones. Much like our 23rd-century counterparts, though, many people still find audio calls sufficient for most conversations.

Of course, as real-world technologies progressed, Star Trek’s creators had to keep advancing their conjectures of what the space explorers of the future would use. When Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered in 1987, the handheld communicators were nowhere to be seen on the new and improved starship Enterprise. Instead, characters were equipped with a piece of jewelry, typically worn on the chest, where it also served as the Starfleet uniform insignia. Called the combadge, it made communications utterly simple. Crew members tapped the badge and spoke aloud to initiate a conversation: “Picard to Riker.” Though the visual design of the combadge would continue to evolve, it served as the main communications device through Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager.

Pretty cool—and perhaps, like Kirk’s original communicator, closer to being a reality than it might seem. Google has already developed a prototype wearable communicator that can be worn as a badge on the chest and, you guessed it, turned on with a quick tap. Amit Singhal, the Google engineer behind the project, says the similarity of that prototype is no coincidence. “I always wanted that pin,” Singhal told TIME in 2015. “You just ask it anything and it works.” The communicator uses Bluetooth and can play audio to headphones or through a speaker. Singhal, who retired from Google in early 2016, is a devoted Trek fan; he gave another project at the company the code name Majel in honor of Majel Barrett Roddenberry, who died in 2008. (The actress was the wife of Gene Roddenberry and played Nurse Chapel along with voicing the Enterprise computer.)

There is one thing Star Trek failed to foresee about the phones of the future: that humans would become oddly addicted to them. You never saw Starfleet officers texting away while oblivious to their physical surroundings. The closest thing to that ever depicted was a virtual-reality device in the Next Generation episode “The Game.” Brought on board by Cdr. Riker, it swiftly gets nearly the entire crew hooked—and is then revealed to be part of an alien race’s scheme to commandeer the Enterprise. Fortunately, the plan is thwarted by a quick-thinking Wesley Crusher.

COMMUNICATIONS WASN’T THE ONLY ZONE where Star Trek foreshadowed the devices to come. The show was equally farseeing in its depictions of information technology. In the late 1960s, computers were mainly the realm of businesses and universities; they filled entire rooms with their massive equipment racks. The onboard computer for the Apollo spacecraft then voyaging to the moon was considered a triumph of miniaturization—invented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it weighed 70 pounds. Its entire memory could hold only the equivalent of a few seconds of an iTunes music file.

Humans interacted with those ’60s computers using punch cards and teletypes. Aboard the Enterprise, things were far simpler. Crew members spoke instructions to the ship’s computer, which would respond with a synthesized voice or by showing information on a display. Today, chatty computers are beginning to appear all over the place. Amazon sells a smart-home gadget called the Echo that answers to the name Alexa and will start playing music or answer search queries in response to a voice command; Apple’s Siri can converse with iPhone users to complete routine tasks.

What seemed even more futuristic was the apparent omniscience of 23rd-century information technology. The Enterprise computer, both in Kirk’s era and later aboard Picard’s ship, contained practically anything crew members might want to know—the ultimate library, available instantly all the time. Now we take for granted the massive repository of Wikipedia and the power of Google to find answers to all kinds of questions. And the USB flash drives we use to physically carry computer files are much more svelte than the “record tapes” from the Enterprise.

As for looking at readouts of all that information, folks on the 1960s Enterprise didn’t have the most inspiring technology: junior officers would present Kirk reports to approve on one of the most unappealing tablet computers ever seen: a bulky black-box affair with a slanted top, seemingly meant to evoke an electronic clipboard rather than a tablet computer. (A more recognizable gadget in this category can be seen in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the astronauts watch video on a flat display called the Newspad.) By the Next Generation era, Starfleet had modernized its tablets into a touchscreen called the Personal Access Display Device, or PADD. The PADD came in a variety of sizes—just like Apple’s iPad and Samsung’s Galaxy tablets. But it’s worth noting that an important forerunner of today’s ubiquitous tablets, the Apple Newton MessagePad, arrived in 1993—while Star Trek: The Next Generation was still airing new episodes.

PLENTY OF OTHER EXAMPLES DEMONSTRATE the ability of Star Trek’s designs and gadgets to anticipate—or inspire—our real-world future. A unit of the U.S. military reportedly built a command center that strongly resembled the layout of the U.S.S. Enterprise bridge. (Foreign Policy magazine quoted a retired officer as saying, “Everybody wanted to sit in the chair at least once to pretend he was Jean-Luc Picard.”)

Starfleet’s medical technology looked so sensible that engineers are racing to mimic it for the 21st century. The Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize competition will award $10 million to a team that can create a tool, weighing no more than 5 pounds, to “accurately diagnose 13 health conditions.” The competition has explicitly linked its work to Star Trek, showing images of Starfleet tricorders on its website and bringing actor Brent Spiner, who portrayed Lt.-Cdr. ­Data, onstage at an event. A winner is expected to be announced in 2017.

More seems certain to come. Silicon Valley hasn’t yet built a “replicator” as magical as the Starfleet devices that can materialize a meal or a tool in seconds, but advances in 3-D printing suggest that the capability isn’t far off. ­Language-translation software for smartphones is bringing Trek’s universal translator within reach. And artificial retina systems for the blind offer hope that Geordi La Forge’s sight-restoring VISOR won’t remain science fiction.

It was sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke—who wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey—who once ­posited this: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Today, technology is advancing ever more rapidly—giving everyone some Star Trek magic centuries before its time.

Beings of the 23rd century use “communicators”—remarkably familiar handheld devices that allow wireless contact across great distances.

Far ahead of schedule, in the late 1980s, telecom giants like Motorola introduced flip phones reminiscent of the distant future portrayed in Star Trek.

Bluetooth earpieces, tablet computers and virtual-reality headsets are a few of the real-life technologies foreshadowed by the futuristic series.

Amit Singhal models a Google prototype of a Bluetooth-enabled lapel-pin device modeled after the iconic Star Trek communicator badge.

Kirk and McCoy use a supposedly futuristic tablet computer. The clunky electronic clipboard is a far cry from an iPad, but the concept demonstrates the technological foresight of the Trek series.