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Star Trek Technology That’s Actually Real
No, we don’t have transporters or warp drives. But here’s some tech that started in Star Trek that is now real.
Automatic Doors
On the original show, the automatic doors were operated by set hands. There are numerous out takes where they failed to do their job. The poor actors had to act as if they absolutely trusted the doors would indeed open.
The first automatic doors were invented in 1954 and installed in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1960. They were mat actuated, and the reason it happened there? Corpus Christi was so windy people kept having doors blown shut on them.
However, the first motion detector activated doors didn’t appear until the 1970s. I remember as a kid seeing them as this new thing and in the UK they were called “Invisible doormen.”
The Star Trek automatic doors, however, were much faster than the automatic doors of the day. Certainly I almost walked into more than one “invisible doorman.”
Hyposprays
Yes, hyposprays exist. There are reasons we don’t use them.
They’re more commonly called jet injectors. However, we don’t use them that much for a few reasons:
- They can carry contamination from one patient to the next. Presumably, Dr. McCoy…