"Star Trek" inspired the inventor of the mobile phone

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A trip to the four corners of the galaxy, pointy ears and a revolutionary way of communicating...This week, in SERIELAND, Clémence Olivier takes you behind the scenes of the cult series "Star Trek".

Black Mirror, Upload, Years and Years… New technologies are a real source of inspiration for series creators. They have fun showing us their benefits, their limits, their dangers also for humans and for our societies. But, sometimes, it is the series that stimulate the creators of new technologies! This is what happened in the early 190s! A cult science fiction series, Star Trek, inspired a man with a genius invention: the cell phone!!!

To understand why, I have to take you back a bit. At the end of the 1960s precisely. At that time, ordinary mortals obviously did not walk around with a phone in their pocket, even less with a smartphone that allowed them to surf the web. Nah, in the late 1960s when you want to make a phone call, you have to be plugged into a socket. You make your phone calls from your home, from your workplace, from a phone booth or even, if you're a little hyped, from your car!!

Before the mobile phone, the communicator!

Well, not exactly. There are still a few people who make calls as they please, wherever they want and without being connected: these are the heroes of Star Trek, this series created in 1966 by Gene Roddenberry, which tells the journey of Captain Kirk, of Mr. Spock and their crew exploring the universe. And to achieve this, they use a particular object: "the communicator". We discover it from the 1st episode of season 1.

"The communicator" is an object that was imagined by the creator of the series Gene Roddenberry and by the scientists he called on to be as relevant as possible. It looks like a kind of rectangular compass with a flap. Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and the crew members use it when they're out and about to communicate almost instantaneously with their comrades still in the ship. It's much more effective than a simple walkie talkie. It works at very, very long distances and it's practical, this small object can be attached to the belt, held in the pocket, and can be drawn very quickly in an emergency.

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When he discovered this object in front of his television in the early 1970s, during a rerun of the series, the American engineer Martin Cooper was amazed. For years, he has worked for the telecommunications company Motorola, particularly on portable radios. And the pressure is tough against the sector giant AT&T to develop an ever more innovative means of communication. But the series gives him the impetus to go further and to design a project that he had not dared to develop until then: it is therefore the mobile phone!

The brick

For 90 days, with his crew, Captain Martin Cooper works hard. And in the spring of 1973, he unveiled the very first wireless mobile phone! This object does not allow you to call a spaceship, it is less manageable and less discreet than Kirk's communicator but it is no less impressive. We call it the brick. Because it weighs not far from 1kg and measures 25cm long without counting the antenna! Its battery only lasts 20 minutes and its exorbitant price is enough to scratch Mr Spock's pointy ears, but it works! Martin Cooper launched it with great fanfare in the middle of New York. And as a final snub, he took advantage of the event to make a quick phone call from his brick-mobile phone to his competitor, Joel Engel, in charge of development at AT&T...

And it won't be the only time Star Trek has inspired inventors! The first home computer, the Altair 800, is said to have been named after the Altair solar system, which was also discovered years earlier in the famous science fiction series.

As for the developers of the mp3, of the instant translation…they can also thank her. The series had imagined years earlier the ancestor of these technologies!

Star Trek, the original series

It's 3 seasons, 79 episodes

It is available on Netflix