What did Cochrane invent???

150 doesn't have to be accepted as literally 150. The way real people talk it could be fudged to be anything around 145 to 155 years.

 

Quite so. We're talking about the second or third decade of the 22nd century, most probably - but Kirk could have been exaggerating a bit, as he wanted to emphasize the almost unbelievably long time that had passed, and it's actually the 2130s he's talking about.

We know the exact dates for most of Cochrane's life, but the disappearance remains a rough estimate - and this means that his birthday is equally unknown, because all we know is that he was 87 at the time of his disappearance. (Or, rather, that after his disappearance, he was found by the Companion at the age of 87, meaning he might actually have disappeared at a somewhat younger age.)

Plausible birthdays thus range from the early 2030s to the 2040s, which is a bit annoying because we'd rather want to extend the range to earlier dates to explain Cochrane's wrinkled looks in 2063.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I think it stands to reason that the motivation for Cochrane's research was military. In Whom Gods Destroy, reference is made to the "Cochrane deceleration." Generally, if military maneuvers are named after you it means that you had something to do with developing those maneuvers. Cochrane (in TOS) came of age during World War III which, according to Memory Alpha, lasted from 2026 through 2053. That time period jibes with what is offered in Metamorphosis

 

To be sure, the maneuver might be unrelated to Zephram Cochrane, and instead related to the great Admiral Thomas Cochrane (1775-1860) or one of his real or fictional descendants. A naval maneuver from the days of Earth's high seas fighting could easily have given its name to a later spatial equivalent; odder things have happened, such as football maneuvers becoming military terminology...

If it's ol' Zeppy they're talking about, it still need not indicate he was doing military research. People like Venturi, Mach and Doppler have their names immortalized in military hardware despite not being militarily oriented or funded. "Cochrane deceleration" might refer to the technical aspects of achieving a deceleration, rather than to the tactical aspects of decelerating.

However, given Cochrane's character in ST:FC, I'd think he'd indeed market his invention as a wonderful new weapon, to as many militaries as he could come to contact with...

Timo Saloniemi

 

The motivation for Cochrane's research was money, dollar signs, tropical islands, and naked women. To me, that says that he was hoping to sell the engine to the highest bidder, or he was someones employee in the project look forward to a contractual bonus.

Unless memory alpha is directly quoting an episode or a fact, the accuracy of any information on that website is very suspect. Unfortunately, the people who write some of those articles have a fondness for extrapolation.

The 2053 year corresponds with Data's statement during First Contract, that the Enterprise E had arrived in the past approximately ten years after the third world war. Where does the 2026 year originate?

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To make my time line work, we would have to forget the age of the actor who played him. If Cochrane was 87 (I forgot that) when he disappeared, then he would have had to of been about 33 at the time of the first flight. Years of hard drinking and hard partying could have accounted for his appearance.

Or, James Cromwell was only depicting Cochrane, and Glen Corbett's appearance is the true look of Cochrane at the time of the first flight, but that's getting into a weird area.

 

It's amusing that (according to the statues we saw) the world remembers Cochrane in his exact ST:FC guise, down to his funny little hat. One'd think there would be an incentive to erase at least some of those signs of hard partying from the distinguished face...

We might always come up with entertaining conspiracy theories, too. Perhaps the Borg killed the 33-year-old Zephram Cochrane with their bombardment, and Deanna Troi instead met the hard-drinking and womanizing 52-year-old test pilot Joe Doverylittle who wanted his share of the glory and the liquor and assumed Cochane's identity when Troi pushed it onto his lap? It's not as if anybody else but our heroes ever identified the drinker as Cochrane, really.

And given the iterative nature of the time-traveling adventure, Joe's face and body would subsequently be immortalized in stone and various other materials; perhaps Troi only tentatively accepted Joe's ploy in the first iterations, and mainly thanks to the amount of alcohol ingested by her, but by the later iterations the idea had grown in strength and Troi was history's witness to the face of the great warp inventor...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Lily, on a single occasion, refers to the drinker as "Zee."

Look at Gabriel Bell, who in the history books has the appearance of Ben Sisko.

 

If it's said onscreen it's canon and I see no reason not to take Kirk at his word he's a historian and I'm sure he had to learn about Conchrane at the Academy since he was the first person to recognize Cochrane.

 

Odds are against it being exactly 150 years since the disappearance, though. Against it being exactly 150 years since anything, that is. There's only one chance in fifty, after all, of something happening such a number of years ago that it's divisible by this round number fifty...

People round up and down, the more so when they know their stuff. An amateur historian might remember a specific date because he had to learn it by rote. A more experienced person would remember the event through the context and refer to the era rather than to the (as such meaningless) date.

The good old Star Trek Chronology has attempted to turn certain onscreen mentions of "150 years ago" or "two centuries ago" into exact (if highly unlikely) dates. So far, it has failed: those dates have not been re-referred to in onscreen material. Even the date of Cochrane's first warp flight was altered from the Chronology bet of 2061 to (the also more or less arbitrarily chosen, and thus no less believable) 2063 when ST:FC was made.

Timo Saloniemi

 

There's nothing saying that Cochrane left right after the first warp flight he must've gotten rather old before he left and he was dying before the Companion gave him he's youth back. I remember when it was mentioned in Borken Bow that Cochrane hadisappeared that people in the Enterprise wondered if it was accurate, they'd forgotten what Kirk said in Metamorphosis and even the events of the ep. altogether. But even there they had aged Cochrane quite a bit from his appearance in First Contact.