NavList:

I promised in my last message that "there's more" to say about navigation slide rules in the original Star Trek. You've probably been waiting with bated breath, perhaps massaging a favorite slide rule to ease the stress. :)

It goes back to the very first episode of the actual series, and it's a jackpot --not just one, but three circular slide rule devices. Most viewers who paid any attention to Star Trek are aware that there were two pilots to the series. These were not production episodes, and they look decidedly different. Some prominent cast members are "missing", the uniforms are different, and some characters had not yet been fully established --Spock smiles and "yells" in the pilot episodes (he also yells in the first production episode and then amusingly scolds a subordinate saying 'there's no need to yell'). Those two pilot episodes have been shown in the normal syndication runs of the original Star Trek down through the decades, and viewers don't pay much attention to their peculiarity. There is one other slightly unusual episode that was shown out of production order even in the original run of the series starting back in 1966. It was tenth in broadcast order, but, in fact, the very first episode of Star Trek filmed, in late May/early June of 1966 (for spaceflight context, this was a few months after Gemini 8 spun out-of-control nearly killing astronauts Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott, both of whom later walked on the Moon, and filming ended just a day immediately before the launch of Gemini 9 which failed to dock with a broken docking target --the infamous "angry alligator"). That very first production episode was shown tenth in the run of the series and in no particular order in later re-runs and syndication, but if you watch it today, there's no question that this this is "Trek 101", where it all began. It's called "The Corbomite Maneuver" and if you have never seen it, it's good, like a sip of delicious tranya... "I hope you relish it as much as I". Go look for it!

In that first production episode of Star Trek, there is a meeting in the briefing room where the officers discuss options for dealing with an exceedingly powerful alien device (a colorful spinning cube) that is holding their starship and blocking its path, as if they are stuck in "flypaper" as they put it. The briefing room set is well "decorated" with coffee cups, digital notepads, and computer memory cards (colorful squares) and, yes, slide rules. I count three distinct circular slide rules scattered on the briefing room table. One of them is the E6B with the yellow ring which we see later (and last) in that second season episode that I described in my prior post. There is also a smaller, less photogenic type of E6B that we will see again in another episode (more below). And finally there is a circular slide device that I cannot identify. It may be another aviation slide rule, or it could be something as simple as a unit conversion calculator or even a sales tax calculator. At the end of this meeting in the briefing room, we see a main character of this original Star Trek pick up the yellow ring E6B. Is it Spock? Nope. It's Uhura, who, because this is the first episode, is wearing the "wrong" color of mini-dress uniform (she wore early-color-tv-bright red in all later episodes). There's no reason that she's picking it up. I imagine the direction to the actors was simply, "grab your stuff, clear the table, as you leave". I've included images below showing the briefing room scene, wide view, zoomed in, and marked up. Can anyone identify that circular "slide rule" (that's Scotty lifting it off the table)? The yellow ring E6B appears again in the same episode a few minutes later -- a random crew member is holding it on the bridge, looking distinctly puzzled by his role there. In this first episode of Star Trek, there's clearly no purpose at all for the various slide rules except to serve as set decoration. They are tech-y props. That said, we shouldn't imagine that the prop masters and directors didn't understand what these props were, in reality. A high fraction of the production crew, from producers and directors to actors and prop masters, had served in the Second World War or Korea (the war in Vietnam was ramping up in 1966 but did not directly impact Hollywood), and some had been aviators or had been trained as navigators. This was not history to them. The end of World War II was only 21 years in the past when this episode of Star Trek was being filmed. Think of 21 years in the past today... That's nothing! :)

At least two other early episodes in the first season of Star Trek feature either the yellow ring E6B or the smaller white E6B. First up, in the very silly, quaintly sexist episode "Mudd's Women", we see Spock on the bridge apparently doing some calculation on the yellow-ring E6B. This scene occurs during a period where the ship is in distress, operating on low power, and there could be some justification for turning off major systems and using a handheld device to figure things out. OK so that conceivably fits the dramatic action and logic. In another early episode, "The Naked Time", much of the crew has gone mad from some strange alien pathogen that makes them all act as if they're drunk or high. One young officer, infected by the pathogen, has taken control of major ship systems including the engines and the ship's computer (they only have one!). Meanwhile the orbit of the ship is decaying, and Spock must calculate how much time they have left. Again a handheld device make some sense here, and the prop they use is the smaller white E6B.

Why am I bothering with any of this? Again, it's about seeing how navigation was "displayed" in a broader cultural context through the decades. There were no sextants in the original Star Trek, but handheld navigation-related slide rules appeared regularly in early episodes. These simple devices "hinted" at handheld high-tech. If they had had anything equivalent, I suspect the production crews would have used something like an iPad in these sequences. In later Trek incarnations, these early props were apparently replaced by purpose-built props designed to represent futuristic devices (padds) that more closely resembled handheld computers. The E6B devices were a cheap equivalent in 1966.

Yes, I'm done. No wait! .... ;)

Frank Reed

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