6 minute read
Beam Me Up, Bentley
How real-life science inspired Star Trek writers to invent the holodeck and, along the way, re-shaped everything from eye exams to aircraft design.
By Madeleine Bradford
IMAGINE A SPACE THAT COULD BE ANYTHING
you want: the misty streets of London. A film noir. A Wild West town. A baseball diamond.
That’s the holodeck, an imaginary room on the television show Star Trek Enterprise. The holodeck projects a holographic area that acts like a physical space, fueling many of the show’s plots and escapades.
But Bentley papers reveal that, without the University of Michigan, the Star Trek holodeck wouldn’t exist.
To understand why, first imagine a group of scientists, staring at a train that isn’t actually there.
It looks just like a small model of a train. It’s vivid as life. You could wave a hand right through it.
It is, in fact, a hologram.
Invented in 1963 by U-M Professors Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks at Willow Run, and displayed in 1964, holography was a groundbreaking discovery. Previous attempts had been blurry, because most available light sources couldn’t create a clear enough image.
Their solution? Lasers! They offered a three-dimensional view so crisp that, when Leith later showed a holographic microscope to a class of children, they were surprised when they couldn’t turn the knobs. Their thank-you note survives in Leith’s papers, alongside explanations of how holograms work.
On a basic level, holography is about capturing interactions between beams of light. Two lasers are needed.
The first laser shines across the object that will become the hologram. The other laser shines on the photographic plate. The two beams meet on that plate, creating what is called a “pattern of interference,” capturing a three-dimensional image.
With the hologram “Toy Train,” the field of optics changed forever. Scientists queued excitedly to take a peek; the glass plate recording of it now lives at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. It inspired progress—and imaginations.
Enter Gene Dolgoff.
A scientist interested in 3-D photography, Dolgoff was immediately curious about holography.
“I called up the researcher who had made the first hologram, Emmett Leith, at the University of Michigan,” Dolgoff says in an interview transcription on the official CBS Star Trek website. “We became very good friends over the phone, and I started learning all about holography. He totally opened up my mind into a new world of physics.”
Dolgoff started experimenting. His holographic work drew attention, and he was soon introduced to Gene Roddenberry— best known as the creator of Star Trek.
Imagine a place where you could walk around in a completely holographic space, Roddenberry and Dolgoff mused. From their imaginations, the Star Trek holodeck emerged.
Holograms might inspire science fiction, but they’re also used in eye exams, in forensic science, in aircraft design, in movies— and Dolgoff himself even invented the version used on your credit cards.
In true visionary fashion, Leith and Upatnieks didn’t just change reality. They also allowed people to imagine what reality could become. To learn more about the invention of holography, take a look at the Emmett Leith papers, and the Juris Upatnieks papers, which discuss how holograms shaped history.
Professor Emmett Leith demonstrates how holography works using a small building from a toy train set.
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