Science Fiction & Fantasy Asked by ThePopMachine on November 28, 2020
This term has a long history in Star Trek:
Star Trek: First Contact
ST:TNG episode “First Contact”
First Contact Day
Also:
Stargate: Atlantis episode “First Contact”
Does this term originate in Star Trek or was it used in previous sci-fi works or does it predate sci-fi in discussing initial contact between cultures.
Actually, the first use of this exact phrase, at least in printed works, was in 1875, according to Google's handy Ngram Viewer:
This was used in an astronomical sense, in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society :
But for usage in the desired sense of "initial contact between cultures", the very first appearance was in the (rather lengthy) title of the following book:
by W. Scoresby Routledge and Katherine Routledge, first published 1910.
These instances predate the term's first appearances in science fiction, i.e. Murray Leinster's 1935 novella Proxima Centauri and his 1945 novelette First Contact.
In the former, we have the passage
He had piloted the Adastra to its first contact with the civilization of another solar system...
which provides the first usage of the phrase in science fiction (in the desired sense).
(Thanks to @user14111 for the Proxima Centauri reference, and for pointing out that a 1916 instance reported in a prior version of this answer may not have been correct.)
Correct answer by Praxis on November 28, 2020
As far as I know, the first use of this exact phrase was in 1945 (~20 years before Star Trek), in a short story by Murray Leinster called First Contact. This story has long been considered one of the best science fiction stories ever (it's in the "Hall of Fame", and is in a number of anthologies such as this one.)
In fact, the author's estate tried to sue Paramount for trademark infringement over Star Trek: First Contact. The court found that Leinster probably did coin the term, but in the interim decades, it had become too generic to trademark any more.
Answered by KutuluMike on November 28, 2020
According to the Science Fiction Citations site, the earliest known occurrence of the term first contact in the science-fictional sense of "[t]he first meeting between two different intelligent species" was in the novella "Proxima Centauri" by Murray Leinster (pseudonym of William F. Jenkins), which first appeared in the March 1935 Astounding Stories (available at the Internet Archive). The following quotation is from page 21,column 2, of the original magazine publication, or p. 669 of Isaac Asimov's anthology Before the Golden Age:
He had piloted the Adastra to its first contact with the civilization of another solar system.
Answered by user14111 on November 28, 2020
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