The Time Machine.1: Launch Point

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is equivalent to magic."
Arthur C. Clarke

H.G. Wells has become so identified with The Time Machine that several times he has been portrayed not only as the story’s author, but as the machine’s inventor, and a time traveler himself.

Malcolm McDowell as H.G. Wells, time traveller
in Time After Time

Though in the novel the time machine’s inventor is referred to only as “the Traveller,” he is identified as H. George Wells in the first Hollywood movie adaptation of The Time Machine in 1960.

Going a step further, the 1979 Nicholas Meyer film Time After Time fully portrayed H.G. Wells as the inventor of the time machine and a time traveler to 1970s San Francisco.

Lois and Clark

This identification seemed to have achieved the status of a pop culture stereotype by the 1990s when several episodes of the TV series Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman featured a time-traveling H.G.Wells, who shows up in Metropolis.

Rod Taylor (seated, second from left) as Wells in 1960 George
Pal production of The Time Machine

Even for those who don’t go that far, the novel seems to have established an image of Wells as a comfortably wealthy middle-aged gentleman of the Victorian era, wearing fine suits and attended by servants in his great London house as he entertains important men of the day: in other words, in the clothes and context of the protagonist of The Time Machine.

Wells with his wife Jane on their latest technology,
the tandem bicycle in the 1890s

The reality was different. Though eventually his writing would earn him a similar status, at the time he was working on The Time Machine, the actual H.G. Wells was in his late twenties, short of money and living in a series of rented rooms.

 One hot August night he wrote at a parlor table with the window wide open for air. Moths attracted by the paraffin lamp flew through it and flopped around him, while outside a loud voice belonging to his landlady complained about him and his late hours (and all the expensive lamp oil he was using), ostensibly to a neighbor.

Wells was still an outsider. But his years in London, his work as a journalist, his reading and his acute curiosity made him an observant one. And there was much to observe.

For in many visible ways, London in the 1890s was the fulcrum of the future. It was the largest city in the world, and the center of world finance, industry, trade and transportation. With new telegraph cables under the sea, it was a global communication center. The British empire was long-lived, far-flung and vast, and as its capital, London was at the living center of history.

It was also an intellectual crossroads, a cauldron of knowledge, debate, literature and theatre, with a mix of new journals featuring outspoken opinions and speculations. It was a city of science, where theories were announced, ambitious expeditions and explorations were launched and celebrated, and where the latest technologies were on display.

1890s London street depicted in 1980s/90s Granada TV series
of Sherlock Holmes stories starring Jeremy Brett

The London that Wells knew was also in a period of transformation, when elegant but fading elements of the past coexisted with the forerunners of the future.  This was still the London of Sherlock Holmes, of Victorian ladies and gentlemen in horse-drawn carriages clattering through gas-lit streets. But some homes had electricity. Telegraph wires sang through the sky.

London traffic had resulted in the first urban underground railroad system in the world. Cholera epidemics earlier in the century eventually led to a rudimentary sewage system. But as in Dickens’ day there were still vast slums. An unromantic toxic fog hung over the city, produced by smoky factories more than by moody nature.

Even when the new machines were invented aboard, they quickly came to London. By 1895, Henry Ford had produced his first car and Diesel patented his engine; the Lumieres invented the cinematograph and motion picture camera, Edison the phonograph disc and Marconi the radio.  Machines could do magic.

Meanwhile, several seemingly unrelated new inventions, such as the electric elevator, the adding machine, cash register, the typewriter and the automatic telephone switchboard were combining with mass-produced steel to herald a new city dominated by high rise office buildings.

Before the decade ended, scientists would announce the discovery of the principles of rocket propulsion, the existence of radioactivity, radium and the electron, and Max Planck proposed his theory of the quantum. The science of the 20th century was underway.

1894 Art Nouveau cover of a publication
that often featured the work of H.G. Wells

"The relationship between 'imagination' and 'action' and between 'fantasy' and 'reality' were becoming more complex in the 1890s," wrote historian Asa Briggs, "as the religious props which had sustained traditional societies began to be knocked down and as the scale of economic enterprise was enhanced."

The new woman, the new journalism, art nouveau--to be new was everything and not to be new, wrote a critic in 1892, "is to be nothing."  Yet expansion and upheaval in the industrial age broke the continuity of many lives and communities, and cast the lives of everyone into new shapes--while destroying more than a few. Sons and daughters could no longer do exactly what their parents had done. They did not even inherit the same community, or the same world. Their present was very different from the past, and it seemed inevitable that the future would be a different world again.

"The Scream" (1893) by Edvard Munch is often cited as
an expression of 1890s anxieties 

While rapid change and powerful new technology energized the age, it also created a "curious confusion," in England and across Europe, as one writer observed in 1895, "a compound of feverish restlessness and blunted discouragement, of fearful presage and hang dog renunciation," and even a sense of "imminent perdition and extinction…[that]mankind, with all its institutions and creations, is perishing in the midst of a dying world."

And then there were other late 19th century inventions: nitroglycerin, dynamite, the machine gun, and barbed wire.

The present was moving very fast, but in what direction? So many of the ongoing tumultuous debates of the nineteenth century---in universities and in Parliament, in the burgeoning journals and newspapers that enacted a swiftly expressed public dialogue in this vibrant city---were focused on the essential question of what all this meant.

Evolution and other ideas in contention would have consequences for shaping the years to come. It was a debate for the soul of the future.

That debate was prominent even in the popular press for all of H.G. Wells’ conscious life, and was now reaching a climax in the 1890s, with a new century in sight. It involved theological doctrine and philosophical speculation, and the findings of the still very young social sciences. But most of all it involved the findings and theories of the physical sciences.

Since technology was the most visible agent of change, and since science supported it with ever-increasing knowledge that experience seemed to prove true (if by no other evidence than the fact that these wondrous machines actually worked), the most credible explanations were becoming those based at least partly on science.

Into this world came The Time Machine.

To be continued... For previous posts in this series, click on the "Soul of the Future" label below.