Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Zephram Cochrane

4. He Split The Infinitive

Cochrane First Contact
Paramount

To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before has been associated with Star Trek since day one. It's the opening narration and the ship motto for the USS Enterprise. In reality, the most famous split infinitive of all time is attributed to Gene Roddenberry but thanks to Enterprise's pilot, Broken Bow it also has an in-universe origin too.

Spoken as part of his inaugural speech at the founding of the Warp Five facility, Zephram Cochrane incorporated the legendary phrase and as such a legend was born within Star Trek lore. The speech itself was replayed at the launch of the NX Class Enterprise.

Is he Gene Roddenberry? There's been no official line on this one although it's hard to avoid the point that both were pioneers of Star Trek in the real and fictional universes.

As it would happen in Star Trek: First Contact, Cochrane is also responsible for the one and only occasion that Star Trek is said as two consecutive words across TV and film. Q came close to this with his "Trek among the stars" quip in All Good Things... but Zephram Cochrane remains the sole speaker of the show's title to this day.

Contributor
Contributor

A Star Trek fan from birth, I love to dive into every aspect of the franchise in front and behind the screen. There's something here that's kept me interested for the best part of four decades! Now I'm getting back into writing and using Star Trek as my first line of literary attack. If I'm not here on WhatCulture then you're more than welcome to come and take a look at my blog, Some Kind of Star Trek at http://SKoST.co.uk or maybe follow me on Twitter as @TheWarpCore. Sometimes I force myself not to talk about Star Trek.