A cowboy show in space
Gene Roddenberry, a former bomber pilot and police officer, pitched Star Trek in 1964 as a western set in space, a wagon train to the stars. The network rejected his first pilot episode as too thoughtful for ordinary viewers, then did something almost unheard of and paid for a second one. The series began in 1966 with Captain KIRK, the logical half-Vulcan science officer SPOCK and the ship's doctor, Leonard McCoy, nicknamed BONES, aboard the starship ENTERPRISE.
Ratings were never high, and after the second series the network planned to cancel it. Fans organised a huge letter-writing campaign, and the show got a third series before it ended in 1969. Then repeats became hugely popular, fans held the first conventions, and Star Trek came back as a cartoon, a string of films from 1979, and new series from 1987 with Captain PICARD. Our sci-fi shows page covers the shows that followed it.
Beaming down to save money
The transporter, which lets the crew BEAM from the ship to a planet's surface in a sparkle of light, was partly a money-saver: filming a spaceship landing every week would have cost far more than the show could afford. The famous line beam me up, SCOTTY was never actually said in exactly those words. WARP drive was pure imagination, but in 1994 a physicist, Miguel Alcubierre, worked out a way it might be possible in theory, by stretching space itself, though nobody knows how to build one.
In 1976, after hundreds of thousands of fans wrote to the White House, the first American space shuttle, a test craft that never went into orbit, was named Enterprise, and several of the cast stood beside it at its unveiling. Our spacecraft page covers the real machines.
A salute from a synagogue and a language of its own
Spock's famous VULCAN salute, a raised hand with the fingers split into two pairs, was invented by the actor Leonard Nimoy. He based it on a gesture he had seen as a child in his synagogue in Boston, when priests blessed the congregation with their hands shaped like the Hebrew letter shin.
The warlike KLINGON race speaks a real language, invented for the films in the 1980s by a linguist, Marc Okrand, with its own grammar and thousands of words. Fans have translated Shakespeare's Hamlet into it. WORF, played by Michael Dorn, became the first Klingon officer in STARFLEET.
Uhura, tribbles and the rest of the crew
Nichelle Nichols played the communications officer UHURA, one of the first Black women in a major role on American television. When she thought of leaving after the first series, she met Martin Luther King Jr, who told her how important the role was to millions of viewers and urged her to stay. She did, and years later she worked with the American space agency to encourage women and people from minority groups to apply to become astronauts.
In a 1967 episode, a trader sells the crew a TRIBBLE, a furry, purring creature that turns out to breed so fast that the ship fills up with them. SULU, the helmsman, was played by George Takei, and the PHASER, which can be set to stun, became the crew's standard weapon.
The peaceful FEDERATION of planets spends decades wary of the secretive ROMULAN empire, and later series added the android DATA, who longs to be human, the HOLODECK, a room that can recreate any place or time, and the BORG, half-machine beings who swallow up whole civilisations.