Time Travel: A History Read Online Free

seen the 1960 movie, starring the matinee-handsome Rod Taylor as the Time Traveller (he needed a name, so they called him George) and featuring a machine that didn’t remind anyone of a bicycle. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times called this time machine “an antique version of the flying saucer.” To me it looks like a rococo sort of sledge, with a plush red chair. Apparently I’m not the only one. “Everyone knows what a time machine looks like,” writes the physicist Sean Carroll: “something like a steampunk sled with a red velvet chair, flashing lights, and a giant spinning wheel on the back.” The movie also features the Time Traveller’s erstwhile companion, Weena, played by Yvette Mimieux as a languid peroxide blonde of the year 802701.
    George asks Weena whether her people think much about the past. “There is no past,” she informs him, with no discernible conviction. Do they wonder about the future? “There is no future.” She lives in the now, all right. Everyone has forgotten about fire, too, but luckily George brought some matches. “I’m only a tinkering mechanic,” he says modestly, but he’d like to fill her in on a few things.
    Motion picture technology, by the way, was just coming over the horizon when Wells wrote his fantasy, and he took note. (The bicycle was not the only modern machine from which he drew inspiration.) In 1879 the photographic stop-motion pioneer Eadweard Muybridge invented what he called a zoopraxiscope for projecting successive images to give the illusion of movement. They made visible an aspect of time never before seen. Thomas Edison followed with his kinetoscope and met in France with Étienne-Jules Marey, who was already creating la chronophotographie, followed soon after by Louis and Auguste Lumière and their cinématographe. By 1894, London was entertaining crowds at its first kinetoscope parlor in Oxford Street; Paris had one, too. So when the Time Traveller begins his voyage it looks like this:

I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came to-morrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. To-morrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind….The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness.
    One way or another, the inventions of H. G. Wells color every time-travel story that followed. When you write about time travel, you either pay homage to The Time Machine or dodge its shadow. William Gibson, who would reinvent time travel yet again in the twenty-first century, was a boy when he encountered Wells’s story in a fifteen-cent Classics Illustrated comic book; by the time he saw the movie he felt he already owned it, “part of a personal and growing collection of alternate universes.”

I had imagined this, for my own purposes, as geared in some achingly complex spheres-within-spheres way that I could never envision in operation….I suspected, without admitting it to myself, that time travel might be a magic on the order of being able to kiss one’s own elbow (which had seemed, initially, to be quite theoretically possible).
    In his seventy-seventh year Wells tried to recall how it came to him. He couldn’t. He needed a time machine for his own consciousness. He put it almost that way himself. His brain was stuck in its epoch. The instrument doing the recollecting was also the instrument to be recalled. “I have been trying, for a day or so, to reconstruct the state of my brain as it was about 1878 or 9….I find it