Who thought of what???

[RandyS]

I recently read a Superman/Batman team-up comic from 1958 in which they attend a science fair demonstrating scientists inventions that they hope to mass produce in the future, and one of them was a "matter transporter designed to send people and things from one place to another. This story, written a full six years before Gene Roddenberry claimed that he came up with the concept of the transporter for Star Trek, makes me wonder what else Roddenberry lied about (yes I know he wasn't above stretching the truth when it suited him).

 

[Christopher]

^Roddenberry never claimed to have invented the transporter. As discussed above, stories of teleportation have been around in science fiction since at least 1877. By the time ST came along, it was already quite a common plot device in prose SF, featured in works like The Stars My Destination in 1956 and Rogue Moon in 1960, and was familiar to mass audiences thanks to 1958's The Fly and episodes of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. Roddenberry couldn't have claimed to have invented the concept even if he'd wanted to make that claim, because it was already well-known when ST came along.

 

[sojourner]

^Yea, I think the "claim" he made was actually that he came up with the idea to use transporters to save production costs. Not that he "invented" the idea of the transporter.

 

[RandyS]

^Yea, I think the "claim" he made was actually that he came up with the idea to use transporters to save production costs. Not that he "invented" the idea of the transporter.

It took me a few minutes to find the book I read that in, and apparently I misremembered. It was not Roddenberry would who said it. It was Herb Solow.

 

[Australis]

Keep this in mind: EE 'Doc' Smith wrote the Skylark and Lensman series. They had spme crazy stuff in them. Space wars, with capital ships battering one another, "shields flaring", which you still see in Trek today, for example..

And were read by Roddenberry, Lucas, Spielberg and Straczynski, among many others.

 

[GodThingFormerly]

But as for the concept of a space drive that gets around the relativistic speed limit, that goes back at least as far as John W. Campbell's Islands of Space in 1931...

Hanns Walter Kornblum's 1925 German docudrama Wunder der Schöpfung ("The Miracle of Creation") features a manned FTL starship exploring the solar system and Milky Way universe. Unfortunately, the film was released the very same year that Edwin Hubble announced his discovery of extragalactic... galaxies.

SLR

 

[Christopher]

^Yea, I think the "claim" he made was actually that he came up with the idea to use transporters to save production costs. Not that he "invented" the idea of the transporter.

That sounds more likely.

It continually stuns me how many people assume that a given concept never existed at any time in human history before they first saw it on television or in a movie. If they see one recent show or film that has a concept in common with a slightly earlier show or film, they go online and scream about how the one "ripped off" the other, and it never even occurs to them to consider the possibility that they both may have gotten the idea from a much earlier source, that there are thousands of years of past human creativity that newer works are drawing on. So many people have no sense of history.

 

[Hermiod]

^When I was at school I had a guy angrily list all the ways Star Trek "ripped off" Star Wars.

I didn't enjoy pointing out to him that "Star Trek" wasn't the show with the bald English guy and the Android. Honest.

 

[RobertScorpio]

^When I was at school I had a guy angrily list all the ways Star Trek "ripped off" Star Wars.

I didn't enjoy pointing out to him that "Star Trek" wasn't the show with the bald English guy and the Android. Honest.

^^ one of my coworkers is a BIG time Star Wars fan, having actually been to Lucas ranch years ago. He laughed at that...

Rob

 

[GodThingFormerly]

Depending on how tight your definition of android is, there's always Mary Shelley's book. There's also the Jewish legends of the golem,which date back centuries.

Don't forget Talos. Also, the legendary engineer Hero(n) of Alexandria created various humanoid automata representing Greek deities for use during religious services (i.e., the mobile Temple of Bacchus).

SLR

 

[Crewman47]

As for FTL travel... well, the speed of light has been known to be finite for centuries and Einstein didn't prove it was an absolute limit until the early 1900s, so one could say the concept was around far earlier depending on how you define it. But as for the concept of a space drive that gets around the relativistic speed limit, that goes back at least as far as John W. Campbell's Islands of Space in 1931, which is also apparently the earliest case I know of where the term "space warp" is used for an FTL drive. Interestingly, the quotation at that link I provided mentions the space warp drive's velocity going as the cube of its power, which is reminiscent of the warp-factor formula from The Making of Star Trek and other TOS-era references.

On the Trek scale what would 10 million LY's in 5 days be, it sounds like it could be well beyond Warp 9.99?

 

[RandyS]

^When I was at school I had a guy angrily list all the ways Star Trek "ripped off" Star Wars.

I didn't enjoy pointing out to him that "Star Trek" wasn't the show with the bald English guy and the Android. Honest.

It wasn't?

Well okay, four of them weren't.

 

[RandyS]

^Yea, I think the "claim" he made was actually that he came up with the idea to use transporters to save production costs. Not that he "invented" the idea of the transporter.

That sounds more likely.

It continually stuns me how many people assume that a given concept never existed at any time in human history before they first saw it on television or in a movie. If they see one recent show or film that has a concept in common with a slightly earlier show or film, they go online and scream about how the one "ripped off" the other, and it never even occurs to them to consider the possibility that they both may have gotten the idea from a much earlier source, that there are thousands of years of past human creativity that newer works are drawing on. So many people have no sense of history.

I never assumed anything. I read Solow's book and that's where I got my information.

Simple as that.

 

[RobertScorpio]

^Yea, I think the "claim" he made was actually that he came up with the idea to use transporters to save production costs. Not that he "invented" the idea of the transporter.

That sounds more likely.

It continually stuns me how many people assume that a given concept never existed at any time in human history before they first saw it on television or in a movie. If they see one recent show or film that has a concept in common with a slightly earlier show or film, they go online and scream about how the one "ripped off" the other, and it never even occurs to them to consider the possibility that they both may have gotten the idea from a much earlier source, that there are thousands of years of past human creativity that newer works are drawing on. So many people have no sense of history.

I never assumed anything. I read Solow's book and that's where I got my information.

Simple as that.

And watch, years from now, other people will claim they invented the INTERNET when it was really Al Gore. That day is coming, sooner than you think.

Rob

 

[Hermiod]

^When I was at school I had a guy angrily list all the ways Star Trek "ripped off" Star Wars.

I didn't enjoy pointing out to him that "Star Trek" wasn't the show with the bald English guy and the Android. Honest.

It wasn't?

Well okay, four of them weren't.

Just to clarify, this person somehow managed to miss the 20 or so years of Star Trek before The Next Generation started in 1987.

 

[GodThingFormerly]

I read Solow's book and that's where I got my information.

Harlan Ellison accused Solow & Justman of making stuff up (at least in regard to HL being a barfly) in the expanded 1996 edition of The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay, so it may be a mistake to give Inside Star Trek: The Real Story excessive (i.e., any) credit for accuracy and objectivity.

SLR

 

[RobertScorpio]

I read Solow's book and that's where I got my information.

Harlan Ellison accused Solow & Justman of making stuff up (at least in regard to HL being a barfly) in the expanded 1996 edition of The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay, so it may be a mistake to give Inside Star Trek: The Real Story excessive (i.e., any) credit for accuracy and objectivity.

SLR

i could give a flying "F" what Harlan Ellison has said about anything. And, to this day, I totally believe that CITY was better the way it was filmed. I read Harlan's "version" and to me, it just isn't as dramatic the way it ends (which I wont spoil)..

I had the opportunity to meet Harlan YEARS ago, and after hearing his flippent remarks about others connected to Star Trek, especially people who are no longer around to dispute what he says, I realize why many of them didn't like him either.

Rob

 

[The Comedian]

Re: The Internet

Concept invented by E.M. Forster in his story "The Machine Stops" in 1909.

Check it out: http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html