TOS Innovations

I was a pretty hardcore Trekkie back in the day, so I read a lot of non-fiction/making-of/behind-the-scenes books. I remember having the sense that the original Star Trek series did a lot of things that were quite new for television at the time (like having a spaceship that wasn't a cigar-shaped rocket or a flying saucer), but my memory of what those innovations were exactly has faded over time. Can anyone refresh my memory with some of the things that Star Trek innovated?

 

Let The TREK BBS Threads on TOS and other iterations be your Guide! More information than you can shake a stick at!

 

I dunno. I always think of Star Trek as less "innovative" than "iterative". The spaceship designs were pretty innovative, but a lot of elements, like the transporter, the phasers, the communicators, had been seen before in one form or another (hello Forbidden Planet). The tricorder maybe, albeit it originally started as a secretarial device for Yeoman Rand but over time had its functions expanded in a feature-creep fashion (sort of like Spock).

 

Well, everything in Star Trek was an interpretation of something that had been around in science fiction literature for at least a couple of decades. The idea of warp drive dated to the 1930s (and was extrapolated from general relativity, which was even older). The term "subspace" had been around nearly as long. Teleportation devices had been around in fiction since the late 19th century. And so on. As a rule, everything in science fiction originates in prose long before it shows up onscreen. The real innovation in science fiction is in prose, and what eventually trickles out to film and TV is usually just a watered-down sample.

But in most cases, ST was responsible for taking those established prose concepts and popularizing them, making them familiar to a mass audience for the first time. Perhaps they'd been mentioned in one or two screen works before, but ST made them more familiar and mainstream.

As for the tricorder, that was based on the portable cassette-tape recorders that had recently gone on the market, which were then seen as incredibly modern and cutting-edge devices. So they took that idea of a portable recording device and made it even more futuristic by making it a sensor device and a computer as well, all in the same package. So it was a three-function recorder, hence tri-corder. Not a totally new idea, just an elaboration on something from the real world.


Where TOS was innovative was not so much in the area of technology as in the area of storytelling. It was, in the words of its own early promos, "the first adult science fiction drama." That's a bit of an overstatement, since The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits before it had been adult-oriented; but ST was the first non-anthology TV drama to be written for adult audiences, rather than the younger audiences that were the target for shows like Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. The novelty of it was that it naturalized science fiction -- approaching stories in a futuristic, outer-space setting with the same kind of believable characterization and emotion as any cop show or medical drama or courtroom drama set in the present day.

 

Wasn't Men Into Space made for adults?

(I haven't seen it, but what little I've read about it suggests this.)

As far as the anthologies go, Science Fiction Theatre is another one that should be mentioned. It's no Twilight Zone, but from what I've seen (the first five or six episodes), it's not a kids show.

 

Yeah, Men into Space is what I peg at getting me into science fiction in the first place, in 1959, at age 8. It tried to be realistic in its presentation by picturing a near future based on science concepts at the time. I think it dealt mostly with plots in the solar system, primarily the moon, asteroids, and such shipboard excursions. I think they had a space station too. "With William Lundigan as Col. Edward McCauley." I don't think I've seen it since it went off the air in 1960, it only ran one season. I had a board game of it I think.

Science Fiction Theater with Truman Bradley dealt with some concepts incomprehensible to a pre-teen.

It took a while for me to get used to the design of the USS Enterprise; I'd not seen anything like it before and didn't like it when I first saw it because it was so different.

 

I have to concur that the relative mass appeal is one of the most significant things about Star Trek. Exactly what the innovation is, though, if any, I'm not really sure. The decisions to market for adults, to have high production standards (entailing among other things spending significant money on things purely in the background), and to exploit color technology, they all mattered. It certainly is a lot easier to find the iterations than the innovations.

 

Good point about Men Into Space. ST billed itself as "the first adult science fiction drama," but lots of things bill themselves as firsts when they actually aren't. Still, MIS didn't have a lot of staying power. And I gather it had only one regular character, so it may have straddled the line between anthology and continuing-cast series.

As for the design of the Enterprise, that was pretty innovative. I can't think of any previous screen spaceship that wasn't either a rocket/cigar shape or a flying saucer. (Aside from the TARDIS, that is, though it's debatable how well the label "spaceship" applies to it. The Martian War Machines in War of the Worlds don't count, because they were basically hovercraft -- or actually a variant on the book's tripod walkers, with energy beams for "legs.") Although it still includes elements of both the "saucer" and "cigar shape" conventions.

 

What about food synthesizers and/or replicators?

I assume similar technology had been used in prose but curious about visual media.

 

Those aren't much more than an extrapolation of real world technology that created food actually designed for astronauts during the 60s, some of which had consumer versions like Tang and Space Food Sticks.

 

Oh, artificially manufactured food was a staple of science fiction long, long before Star Trek came along. After all, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, everything was being industrialized and automated, so it was assumed that eventually we'd perfect artificial forms of nutrition superior to the crude, natural kind.

For an onscreen example of an automatic food machine, see the earliest episodes of Doctor Who in 1963. The TARDIS had a food machine that produced food bars with the flavor of multi-course meals -- a staple idea in a lot of SF at the time. Star Trek was actually somewhat unusual in assuming that people in the future would still eat recognizable, natural foods rather than synthetic substitutes. According to The Making of Star Trek, the TOS food slots were not "replicators" (a term coined by TNG), but merely an automated dumbwaiter system, delivering foods that were robotically prepared from real ingredients that were perfectly preserved by advanced methods.

Although there were some TOS episodes where people were shown eating brightly colored food cubes of some sort, so perhaps the artificial-food idea made its way into the show as well.

 

Instead it's essentially a combination of the two; a flying saucer connected to a cigar-shaped main body and two rockets.

 

Or the brightly color cube foods were a dish from some other member planet that some of the humans enjoyed from time to time.

 

^Well, I'm talking about what the people making the show might have had in mind.

 

Ironically, today any food labeled "natural" or "organic" is automatically thought of as somehow better than that nasty artificial stuff!

One idea from Star Trek that I don't recall seeing or reading about in earlier SF were those diagnostic readout panels above the Sickbay beds. Even with all the advances in medical technology since the 1960s, those displays still seem pretty futuristic. We've still a way to go before doctors can get real-time vital sign readings without physically attaching anything to the patient's body.

 

Someone needs to explain this to John Byrne. For some reason, he thinks the 'tri' functionality was new for Kirk and Co., and that Pike's crew used a 'bi'-corder. I'd like to know which function he thinks was new!

Well, the fact that real-time, or plausibly real-time, monitoring even exists in modern hospitals is because doctors and hospital directors back in the '60s saw the monitors they had on Star Trek and asked "Why don't we have anything like that? Let's invent it, and make our jobs that much easier." The difficulty with making it all done by remote is the idea that the monitoring equipment has to be concentrated on a single patient, and not accept ambient signals, either from other people present, or from the local environment, like the air-conditioning. It sounds easy, but I'd wager it's actually a major problem to overcome.

 

Human society has a tendency to take an idea too far, then react against the excess and go too far in the other direction. I've seen signs that there's already some pushback against the idea that "organic" or "natural" foods are automatically better. And we're heading toward the ability to produce meat by 3D bioprinting or other artificial methods, which would be immensely more humane and ecologically sound than raising livestock for slaughter, so there could be strong incentives for accepting that technology (though there would inevitably be a pushback against it in turn).

Actually ST was well behind the prose when it came to medical tech. Around the same time as TOS, we had the diagnostat from Robert Silverberg's The Man in the Maze, the autodoc from Larry Niven's Known Space universe, and the crechepod from Frank Herbert's The Godmakers -- automated pods for treating and healing injuries, regenerating organs, and the like. The concept was around at least as far back as James Schmitz's Agent of Vega in 1949. (I've used the concept in at least two of my own original works, calling them "medbeds.") ST may have had a fancy way to monitor patients, but it was still dependent on a human doctor to actually treat them. (And we can safely assume that those automatic medical units had high-tech monitor displays of their own.)

And here's a reference to a story from 1909 featuring an device in the home that could automatically take your medical readings and telegraph them to your doctor, who could then direct it remotely to administer treatment. Just imagine how Bones would react to that!

Well, since the term "tricorder" wasn't used in either of the pilots, there's technically no in-story reason that this couldn't be the case. (The first time the word was spoken onscreen was apparently "The Naked Time." The second wasn't until "Shore Leave.") After all, I was giving the real-world explanation for the coining of the term. That isn't necessarily the in-universe explanation.

Yup. As I said, ST didn't invent very many ideas, but it did popularize quite a few of them, taking ideas that had previously been familiar only to the niche audience of SF literature and making the general public aware of them.

 

I used to love Space Sticks!

Tang . . . not so much.

 

I remember drinking Tang, but I can't quite remember what it tasted like. Which may be a good thing.

 

It was powdered orangade. Didn't taste bad if you used enough of it. It was what the astronauts drank during the Apollo missions.