TIME TRAVEL NEXUS PRESENTS . . .
Time Travelling:
Possibility or Paradox?
by H. G. Wells
from National Observer, 17 March 1894
—Before H. G. Wells wrote of The Time Traveller that we all know and love, he wrote of two others: The Chronic Argonaut (1888) and today’s intrepid traveler, the Philosophical Inventor (1894). Unlike the chronic argonaut, the inventor—who featured in a seven-part fictionalized discussion of time travel in the National Observer—was a clearly recognizable prototype of the Wells’s later time traveler. I hope you enjoy this first installment and the link to the rest down below.
P.S.: Does anyone know of an earlier use of the actual phrase “time travel” or “time travelling” than the 1894 title of this installment? Or a use of the word “paradox” with respect to moving through time? There are earlier stories, but did any use these phrases?
he Philosophical Inventor was expounding a recondite matter to his friends. The fire burnt brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver, caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses of amber fluid. Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and there was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere, when thought runs gracefully free of the trammels of precision. And he put it to us in this way, as we sat and lazily admired him and his fecundity.
‘You must follow me carefully here. For I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.’
‘Is not that rather a large thing to expect us to begin upon?’ said the argumentative person with the red hair.
‘I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without reasonable ground for it. But you know of course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real existence. They taught you that. Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions.’
‘That is all right,’ said the man with the red hair.
‘Nor can a cube, having only length, breadth, and thickness, have a real existence.’
‘There I object,’ said the red-haired man. ‘Of course a solid body may exist. All real things—’
‘So most people think. But wait a moment. Can an instantaneous cube exist?’
‘Don’t follow you,’ said the red-haired man.
‘Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?’
The red-haired man became pensive.
‘Clearly,’ the Philosophical Inventor proceeded; ‘any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have length, breadth, thickness, and—duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook the fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of space, and a fourth, time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal difference between the former three and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.’
‘That,’ said the very young man, making spasmodic efforts to relight his cigar over the lamp; ‘that is very clear, indeed.’
‘Now it is very remarkable that this is so extensively overlooked,’ continued the Philosophical Inventor with a slight accession of cheerfulness. ‘Really this is what is meant by the fourth dimension, though some people who talk about the fourth dimension do not know they mean it. It is only another way of looking at time. There is no difference between time and any of the three dimensions of space except that our consciousness moves along it. But some foolish people have got hold of the wrong side of that idea. You have all heard what they have to say about this fourth dimension.’
‘I have not,’ said the provincial mayor.
‘It is simply this. That space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call length, breadth, and thickness, and is always definable by reference to three planes, each at right angles to the others. But some philosophical people have been asking why three dimensions particularly—why not another direction at right angles to the other three?—and have even tried to construct a four-dimensional geometry. Professor Simon Newcombe was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago. You know how on a flat surface which has only two dimensions we can represent a figure of a three-dimensional solid, and similarly they think that by models of three dimensions they could represent one of four—if they could master the perspective of the thing. See?’
‘I think so,’ murmured the provincial mayor, and knitting his brows he lapsed into an introspective state, his lips moving as one who repeats mystic words. ‘Yes, I think I see it now,’ he said after some time, brightening in a quite transitory manner.
‘Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry of four dimensions for some time, assuming that the fourth dimension is time. Some of my results are curious. For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at the age of fifteen, another seventeen, another of twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were, three-dimensional representations of his four-dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing.’
‘Scientific people,’ proceeded the philosopher after the pause required for the proper assimilation of this, ‘know very well that time is only a kind of space. Here is a popular scientific diagram, a weather record. This line I trace with my finger shows the movement of the barometer. Yesterday it was so high, yesterday night it fell, then this morning it rose again, and so gently upward to here. Surely the mercury did not trace this line in any of the dimensions of space generally recognised? But certainly it traced such a line, and that line, therefore, we must conclude was along the time-dimension.’
The philosophical person smiled with great sweetness. ‘Are you so sure we can move freely in space? Right and left we can go, backward and forward freely enough, and men always have done so. I admit we move freely in two dimensions. But how about up and down? Gravitation limits us there.’
‘Not exactly,’ said the red-haired man. ‘There are balloons.’
‘But before the balloons, man, save for spasmodic jumping and the inequalities of the surface, had no freedom of vertical movement.’
‘Still they could move a little up and down,’ said the red-haired man.
‘Easier, far easier, down than up.’
‘And you cannot move at all in time, you cannot get away from the present moment.*
‘My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just where the whole world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present moment. Our consciousnesses, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the time-dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave. Just as we should travel down if we began our existence fifty miles above the earth’s surface.’
‘But the great difficulty is this,’ interrupted the red-haired man. ‘You can move about in all directions of space, but you cannot move about in time.’
‘That is the germ of my great discovery. But you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence, I become absent-minded as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of time any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilised man knows better. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the time-dimension; or even turn about and travel the other way?’
‘Oh, this ,’ began the common-sense person, ‘is all—’
‘Why not?’ said the Philosophical Inventor.
‘It’s against reason,’ said the common-sense person.
‘What reason?’ said the Philosophical Inventor.
‘You can show black is white by argument,’ said the common-sense person; ‘but you will never convince me.’
‘Possibly not,’ said the Philosophical Inventor. ‘But now you begin to see the object of my investigations into the geometry of four dimensions. I have a vague inkling of a machine—’
‘To travel through time!’ exclaimed the very young man.
‘That shall travel indifferently in any direction of space and time as the driver determines.’
The red-haired man contented himself with laughter.
‘It would be remarkably convenient. One might travel back, and witness the Battle of Hastings!’
‘Don’t you think you would attract attention?’ said the red-haired man. ‘Our ancestors had no great tolerance for anachronisms.’
‘One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato!’
‘In which case they would certainly plough you for the little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.’
‘Then there is the future,’ said the very young man. ‘Just think! one might invest all one’s money, leave it to accumulate at interest, and hurry on ahead!’
‘To discover a society,’ said the red-haired man, ‘erected on a strictly communist basis.’
‘It will be very confusing, I am afraid,’ said the common-sense person. ‘But I suppose your machine is hardly complete yet?’
‘Science,’ said the philosopher, ‘moves apace.’
I am always amazed by the traveller (or “inventor”) explaining time as the fourth dimension a decade before Einstein’s special relativity. Admittedly, the Euclidean notion of the fourth dimension that Wells gleaned from 19th-century mathematics differs from Minkowski spacetime of relativity—just don’t ask me how!
The transcription of today’s story came from H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction (1975), edited and annotated by Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes. I hope you’ll pop over archive.org to read the other six installments (see pp. 57–90).
For Halloween next month, we’ll bring you a 1911 story by the well-known ghost story writer Oliver Onions. But is the story a ghost story, or does it slip into the realm of time travel? You’ll have to decide that yourself when you visit next month’s TTN Presents. Meanwhile, keep on travelin’! —Michael
Other credits: The opening paragraph of Professor Simon Newcomb’s Modern Mathematical Thought came from the 1 February 1894 issue of Nature, accessed through the University of Colorado library.