Inventions & Science

5 Inventions Influenced by ‘Star Trek’

These inventions boldly go where “Star Trek” went before.

By Kieran Mulvaney

CBS via Getty Images

Published: September 03, 2026, Last Updated: September 03, 2026

When “Star Trek” first premiered on TV on September 8, 1966, it was quite unlike anything that had gone before. While science fiction and spacefaring had been on screen for decades, one look at the crew of the starship Enterprise—featuring a Japanese American helmsman, an African woman as the communications officer and a pointy-eared half-Vulcan, half-human science officer—was enough to show that this was an entirely novel undertaking.

But if a key element of creator Gene Roddenberry’s vision was portraying a future in which people of multiple races, genders, belief systems and species worked together for the common good, another was the futuristic technology on display.

The Enterprise crew sped through the Milky Way in a spaceship, could dematerialize to transport themselves to the surfaces of nearby planets, flip open communicator devices and talk over huge distances as well as analyze the medical condition of patients by waving a diagnostic tool over them. In later installments of the franchise, characters could explore their fantasies among programmable holograms and use replicators to summon up a cup of “tea, Earl Grey, hot.”

How Lucille Ball Gave Us ‘Star Trek’

An accomplished actress, Lucille Ball was also a studio executive and producer who brought us shows like Star Trek and Mission: Impossible.

“I would say that one of the really important things that ‘Star Trek’ gave us is a vision for technology solving some very human problems that we’ve had for a very long period of time,” says Ethan Siegel, an theoretical astrophysicist and the author of the 2017 book Treknology: The Science of Star Trek from Tricorders to Warp Drive. “They find ways that technology can do something that used to require an insane amount of human effort to conduct.”

Importantly, adds Siegel, most of that technology was grounded in reality. “I examined something like 28 different technologies in my book, and even today, only four of those technologies that ‘Star Trek’ envisioned would actually necessitate new physics,” he says. “The other 24…are either already here, are on their way or have been established to be physically possible, and that’s pretty amazing.”

Here are five technologies that “Star Trek” envisioned that have either come to fruition or could conceivably be on the way.

1.

Communicators became cell phones

In the original series, crew members who beamed down to alien worlds could communicate with each other and the ship by flipping open a clamshell-shaped communicator. In 1983, 14 years after the original show was canceled, Motorola released the first commercially available handheld cell phone. Then, in 1996, Motorola released the StarTAC, an early clamshell-style flip phone whose design drew inspiration from “Star Trek” communicators.

Read more: 5 Inventions Influenced by ‘Star Trek’ – HISTORY

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