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One of the most iconic recurring scenes in the much-loved TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) involves the captain of the starship Enterprise, Jean-Luc Picard, alone in his cabin, announcing to thin air, “Tea. Earl Grey.”

A machine set into the wall, resembling a large built-in microwave with its door missing, responds to this command by materializing a fine bone china teacup on a saucer, filled with steaming hot tea. This remarkable device is a replicator (aka molecular synthesizer), a machine that can create almost anything out of thin air, but is particularly used for food and beverages.

As with several other iconic Star Trek technologies, replicators are directly responsible for inspiring developments in real-life technology, which use 3-D printing to create food, meals, plastic and metal items, buildings, and even complex machine parts. Star Trek is far from being the only sci-fi source of inspiration for the dream of a device that can produce finished items from scratch.

To trace the roots of Star Trek’s replicator, it is necessary to understand that it is essentially a repurposed form of the transporter—the teleportation or matter transmission device that “beams” the crew between starship and planet surface. According to legend, the transporter was invented only because the original series lacked the budget to film special, effect-heavy scenes of planetary landing shuttles, but Star Trek did not invent the concept of matter transmission. Its first appearance in science fiction dates back at least as far as 1877, in Edward Page Mitchell’s story “The Man Without a Body,” which prefigures George Langelaan’s much better-known 1957 story “The Fly,” by having a scientist experience a teleportation mishap when his batteries die while he is only partway through a transmission, so that only his head rematerializes.

The replicator uses the same basic principle as the transporter, in which the atomic structure of a physical object is scanned, and the information is used to reconstruct the object at the “receiving” end through energy-matter conversion. In practice, all transporters are replicators, and matter “transmission” is a misnomer, because matter itself is not transmitted, only information. Every time Captain Kirk steps out of the transporter having “beamed up” from a planet’s surface, it is, in fact, a copy of him—the original has been disintegrated during the initial phase of the operation.

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The studio model starship Enterprise from Star Trek was not just a key prop in a groundbreaking series; it and its crews’ travels inspired many who would make their own mark in real-life space exploration. Gift of Paramount Pictures Inc.

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