Pause any Star Trek episode from the past 35 years and there is a fair chance the number 47 sits somewhere on screen. A shield reading. A deck number. A casualty count. A stardate. A weapons locker, a dart score, an off-duty crew complement.
Once a viewer notices it, the number stops feeling random and starts feeling like a signature.
It is one. The man who put it there has a name, the prank that started it has a date, and the writers who ran with it had a phrase for their own habit.
The Pomona College Origin
The story begins in the summer of 1964 at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Two undergraduates, Laurens “Laurie” Mets and Bruce Elgin, set out to test whether the number 47 turned up in nature more often than other numbers. They went looking and they found it. The campus sits off Exit 47 of Interstate 10. Mudd-Blaisdell residence hall, completed in 1947, contains a staircase with 47 balusters. The top row of pipes on the Lyman Hall organ numbers 47. Pomona’s first graduating class in 1894 enrolled 47 students.
