Artistic License History / Star Trek

• In Star Trek:
  • In "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", Louis Pasteur is referred to as a medical doctor. In the real world, Louis Pasteur was a chemist (although one who saved more lives with his work than many real doctors).
  • In "The City on the Edge of Forever":
    • Edith's fate is pinned on the reveal that neither Kirk nor Bones know who Clark Gable is. The episode takes place in 1930, so in fact Edith shouldn't have known who he was, either - he was just a bit player in 1930; he didn't become a star for another two years. Reportedly at one point the script used the name of a lesser-known (to 1960s audiences) actor named Richard Dix, but by the time the episode was filmed it was decided to use the better-known Gable, despite the anachronism.
    • It's insanely unlikely that one outspoken pacifist could have single-handed sabotaged the Allied cause so significantly. Regardless of her motives, Edith would have almost certainly been seen as just another isolationist like Lindbergh. After all, the America First Committee did attract its share of genuine pacifists. And how exactly is she supposed to have succeeded where Lindbergh failed? We know she gets popular in the alternate timeline, but does her fame really eclipse that of Lucky Lindy?
    • Changing history by making USA enter war late or not enter it at all would have many, many consequences which could possibly help the Nazis win World War II^note  And it should be noted that "Hitler wins the war" does not necessarily mean "Hitler conquers the world," though even a negotiated nazi victory would undoubtedly still be a very unpleasant geopolitical condition. Britain could be deprived of vital supplies and eventually forced to surrender. Russians could be unable to launch their great 1943 counteroffensive without all those means of transport and communication they got from Americans, and without the US strategic bombing campaign sapping its frontline strength, the Luftwaffe could've been a much bigger problem on the Eastern Front. Japan could build its empire in Asia unopposed. However, the screenwriters decided to pick one factor on which USA not partaking in war would have little to no impact whatsoever. Contrary to popular belief, the Nazi nuclear program was not nearly as advanced as the Manhattan Project, and it was successfully derailed in 1943 thanks to actions of British Special Operations Executive, without any American involvement.
    • Spock claims that with V2 ballistic rockets at their disposal, Nazis would be able to deliver nuclear payload anywhere they want. In reality, V2's maximum range was only 380 kilometers — not even close enough to endanger USA or other distant allied powers. In addition, the V-2 rocket had a payload that weighed about 2,000 pounds. That was pretty much the limit that it could carry, so it never would have been able to even get off the launch pad with a primitive nuclear weapon based on 1940's technology. Fat Man and Little Boy, the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, each weighed just over 10,000 pounds. The Germans did have some more advanced delivery systems, such as the long-range Amerikabomber project, the V-5 multistage ballistic missile, and the Silbervogel orbital bomber (whose concept was eventually developed into the Space Shuttle), but only the first of these ever made it into the prototype phase.
  • In "Patterns of Force", Kirk repeatedly refers to the SS uniforms as "Gestapo," which was the plain-clothes secret police. Gestapo personnel did wear SS uniforms in occupied territory to avoid being mistaken for civilians, but this isn't occupied territory.
  • In "Bread and Circuses":
    • Bones keeps nagging at the idea of the "sun" faith, saying it doesn't make sense because "Rome had no sun worshipers". Actually, they did, and the Sun god was pretty important. Spock claims later that solar worship was usually a "primitive superstition-religion"; believers in Surya, Shamash and the numerous Egyptian sun deities would have a great deal to say about that, but Gene Roddenberry was all about Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions.
    • Spock claims that about six million people died in WWI and eleven million in WWII. Low-end estimates place the number of dead in the first at about fifteen million, and of the second at an astounding seventy million, with the Soviet Union and China each losing far more than eleven million by themselves. The lowest estimate for Soviet deaths is nearly double eleven million.
  • In "The Savage Curtain", the historical characters, most notably Lincoln, do not look or act much like their real counterparts. Justified, since they are based on Kirk's and Spock's images of these historic figures.
• In Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • In "The Last Outpost", Data describes the color pattern of Germany's flag as "red-black-gold," rather than black-red-gold.
  • In "Loud as a Whisper", Riva, talking about deafness in his family, says "it is similar to The House of Hanover of your planet Earth, all who had haemophilia". However:
    • The royal house status goes by male line only; haemophilia, being a recessive X chromosome gene, almost always goes only by female line (but only affects males), the exception being that a male haemophiliac who has children (which was rare until the mid 1900s) pass the gene to all his daughters and none of his sons. So haemophilia could not possibly go down a royal house.
    • There actually were several haemophiliacs in European royalty. The source was a mutated gene in Queen Victoria, who was from the House of Hanover. It did not affect her; however, it did affect one of her sons (even he wasn't a Hanover), one of the sons of his daughter, and 7 grandsons and great grandsons of Queen Victoria through 2 of her daughters. None of them were from the House of Hanover.
    • Although it can't be proven that the mutation was new with her, no members of her extended family, except her matrilinial descendants, had the disease.
    • Queen Victoria wasn't even the first British monarch from the House of Hanover. She came after George I, George II, her grandfather George III, and her uncles George IV and William IV.
  • In "The High Grounds", when Crusher insists that Washington was a general and not a terrorist, Finn claims that Washington would have been considered a terrorist if he'd lost the war. But while rebel generals may be considered traitors, they are not considered terrorists in the annals of history unless they actually used terrorist tactics. For example, Robert E. Lee has never been considered a terrorist even though he lost the American Civil War.
  • In "Best of Both Worlds, Part I", Captain Picard muses:
    I wonder if the Emperor Honorious, watching the Visigoths coming over the seventh hill, could truly realize that The Roman Empire was about to fall. This is really just another page of history, isn't it? Will this be the end of our civilization?
    • In reality, Honorius was not in Rome when it was sacked by the Visigoths in 410. He was in Ravenna, which had been the capital city of the Western Roman Empire since 402. Furthermore, Picard's comment suggests that the Western Empire fell as a direct result of the Visigoth siege. Although the Empire's power was rapidly diminishing and its prestige was severely weakened by the sack, it did not collapse until 476, 66 years later, when Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus and proclaimed himself King of Italy.
  • In "Who Watches the Watchers", the Mintakans are apparently a Bronze Age society, and their most advanced piece of technology is the bow. It's considerably more advanced than anything else they have, as the bows shown are clearly late 20th Century sporting bows, made of composite plastics rather than wood, and with a dedicated arrow rest on the left which makes them unsuitable for hunting or warfare.
  • In "The Enemy", it seems rather out-of-character for Frenchman Picard to reference Pearl Harbor, the event that led to the United States entering World War II, as the stage for a "bloody preamble to war" when the fighting had been going on in France for several years by that point.
  • In "Time's Arrow":
    • Mark Twain's response to Alfred Russell Wallace is a little misplayed here. Wallace only made the mistake of thinking man was the pinnacle of evolution, as if evolution had a goal. He never thought man was the center of the universe. Additionally, Twain's real response was a more scientific reaction than the spiritual one given in the episode.
    • Jack London never worked as a bellhop, and Samuel Clemens was actually touring Europe during the time the story takes place, and there's isn't any evidence that the two men ever met each other.
  • In "Ship in a Bottle", Moriarty refers to his past as a mere fiction, "the scribblings of an Englishman dead now for four centuries." However, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was Scottish.
  • In "Descent":
    • The person in charge of programming Albert Einstein's holographic counterpart apparently fell for the anecdotal misconception that Einstein was bad at math, which is quite laughable when you consider he was one of history's most influential physicists. In reality, Einstein was actually an exceptional mathematician. This rumor was actually started while he was still alive and comes from his bad university grades. The reason? The curriculum was too easy, so he would skip lectures to teach himself more advanced concepts at the library. Einstein even commented on the original article himself.
      Einstein: I never failed in mathematics… Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus.
    • Newton uses the word "science" in its modern context, but when Newton was alive, the term was "natural philosophy."
    • Also Lampshaded when Newton recounts the apple story and Data mentions that it's "generally considered apocryphal." This doesn't stop an episode of Voyager from claiming a member of the Q continuum rustled the tree, making the apple fall.
  • In "Phantasms", Troi tells Data that even Freud said "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." This quote is now generally accepted to be apocryphal; Freud believed everything in dreams was symbolic, and almost certainly never would have said such a thing.
• In Deep Space Nine:
  • In "In the Hands of the Prophets", Keiko, in an obvious fit of pique and ego, changes her lesson plan to teach about Galileo striving to preach the truth of heliocentrism against the awful persecution of church doctrine (not-so-subtly drawing a comparison between the famous scientific martyr and herself). Except that Galileo 1) wasn't the first to venture the idea of heliocentrism, 2) actually denied really believing in heliocentrism when pressed by the church, and 3) the church largely treated him with kid gloves due to his age, infirmity, and the fact that he cooperated with them willingly the entire time. Additionally, the church wasn't dead set against heliocentrism (Copernicus, who developed the theory, was a Catholic priest after all), and a number of Galileo's detractors came from within the scientific establishment (heliocentrism would overturn 1,500 years of established science dating back to Claudius Ptolemy). Moreover, it was an attempt to reinterpret The Bible, as well as mockery of the Pope, that really got Galileo in hot water with the church. A better example would have been the Scopes trial.
  • In "Little Green Men", Garland mentions the nuclear testing site in Nevada. However, All American atomic testing was being done off-shore in 1947. The Nevada Proving Ground (later renamed the Nevada Test Site) did not open until 1951.
  • In "Bar Association", O'Brien's description of the Battle of Clontarf as the Irish fighting off Viking invaders is an oversimplification, as the Vikings had already established a kingdom in Ireland, and there were Gaelic Irish on their side as well.
  • In "Badda Bing Badda Bang", Benjamin Sisko objects to Vic Fontaine's simulation as being too unrealistic for the time it's supposed to represent. However, Las Vegas was actually much more racially tolerant than Sisko believes. The Rat Pack helped desegregate casinos by refusing to play at any venue that wouldn't allow Sammy Davis Jr. to gamble in them, and thus got many casinos to repeal their policies regarding blacks. Segregation had effectively ended in Vegas by 1960, two years before the program is set. However, Sisko is likely correct that black people would still be treated differently than white people even in a desegregated Las Vegas and certainly much worse in most other corners of the country.
• In Voyager:
  • In "The 37's", Janeway reveals that it's publicly known in the 24th century that Earhart's voyage was actually a spying mission on the Japanese, something that is only a crackpot theory in real life.
  • "Memorial":
    • In-universe when Tom points out that TV's didn't have remotes until after the 50's and B'Elanna calls it "poetic license". (In truth, though, the first TV remote control was invented in 1950, to be precise, a wireless remote control, the "Flashmatic," was developed in 1955 by Eugene Polley.)
    • While Gettysburg was the site of a major battle, it certainly wasn't an atrocity. It can't be compared to the Nakan massacre or to Khitomer.
• Star Trek: Enterprise:
  • "Carbon Creek": What we term today as velcro was invented by a man in Switzerland in 1941 and patented in 1955, not by a woman in the US in 1957. What is interesting is that the writers were apparently fully aware of this as the engineer in question was a man named George de Mestral, which is too much of a coincidence to be accidental.
  • "Storm Front":
    • At the Nazi headquarters, a map of the United States shows the American flag with 56 stars, rather than the 48 it had at the time.
    • Alicia is unfamiliar with the term "World War II," even though use of the term started shortly after the war began.
• In the Star Trek: Discovery episode "Die Trying" Saru's discussion of the Renaissance being immediately preceded by the Dark Ages is about two centuries out of date, even as of 2020. As the article shows, the term "Dark Ages" is presently disfavored altogether. For 200 years prior to the term's being discredited, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Dark Ages were regarded as lasting from the fifth to the tenth centuries, with the Renaissance beginning — at the earliest — during the fourteenth century.

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