Star Trek: 10 Biggest Historical Events That Never Happened
5. Transparent Aluminium
This entry comes with a few 'well, actually' notes, though pure transparent aluminium, as shared with Dr. Nichols in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, remains just over the rainbow. In the film, Scotty gives Nichols the formula for TA, even though it may risk the timeline. True to Original Series form, no one bats an eye.
In the real world, several attempts have been made to produce a transparent material strong enough to do the job that Star Trek called for. A 1933 edition of 'Popular Mechanics' reported that a transparent 'aluminium-like' material was being used in Germany, though it lost much of its metallic nature during fabrication.
Corundum is a mineral that contains many of the properties of transparent aluminium, while in 2009, TA was successfully created in a lab, though only existed for 40 quadrillionths of a second, before the material turned opaque again.