The Time Machine

Wells’s The Time Machine is a seminal work of science fiction, spawning many imitators and making time travel commonplace within the genre. However, Wells was not the first writer to envision time travel in a work of fiction. Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, for example, appeared six years before The Time Machine. Washington Irving’s short story “Rip Van Winkle,” in which a man falls asleep for 20 years and then awakes to a changed reality, was published in 1819.

What made Wells’s book unique among these similar tales was his emphasis on technology. In The Time Machine, technological details and “science-y” explanations are placed front and center and are intended to amaze and amuse the reader. Significantly, the title of the book itself tells us that the book is about a machine rather than, say, a fantastic journey or a traveler.

The time machine is constructed from an unusual collection of materials. In the inventor’s device, “Parts were of nickel, parts of ivory, parts had certainly been filed or sawn out of rock crystal” (11). These elements receive mention not because Wells possessed some arcane knowledge about how a real time machine might work but because grouping together materials that are both modern (like nickel) and exotic or unusual (like ivory or rock crystal) attracts the reader’s interest and wonder.