Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Book Reports The Time Machine1 The Time Machine1 A glimpse of the future of the human race. What if it were possible to travel through time? Would you go forward or backward in time? Would your aim be monetary gain or enhanced knowledge or something completely different? The possibilities are endless. The Time Machine is a story of a time traveler and his experience with time travel. The story was first published in 1895 by H.G. Wells. This is a great story because of the fascinating ideas it presents and the way the author has you asking yourself ‘what if?’. The first idea presented in the story is that of a fourth dimension. I wasn’t exactly sure what the fourth dimension was because it is not something that is dealt with a whole lot in every day living. The story begins with the time traveler sitting in a room with some guests. We never learn what the time traveler’s name is, he is simply referred to as the time traveler in the story. I thought the explanation of the fourth dimension that the time traveler gave to his guests was easy to understand and very interesting. The time traveler explains, “ ‘You must follow me carefully. 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 that not rather a large thing to expect us to begin upon?’ said Filby, an ‘I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without reasonable ground for it. You will soon admit as much as I need from you. 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 Psychologist. ‘Nor, having only length, breadth, and thickness, can a cube have a real ‘There I object,’ said Filby. ‘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 Filby. ‘Can a cube that does not last for anytime at all, have a real existence?’ Filby became pensive. ‘Clearly,’ the Time Traveler 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 this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of space, and a fourth, Time.”(1-2) To think of time as something more than just the movement of hands on a clock is fascinating. We are taught in school that everything is three dimensional but never realize that everything real must also have duration. This explanation of time and a fourth dimension really got me into the story and made me think “what if?”. On a side note, I ran across an interesting bit of history as I was researching for this essay. The story mentions a Professor Simon Newcomb in conjunction with the explanation on time as the fourth dimension. The time traveler mentions Professor Simon Newcomb giving a speech to the New York Mathematical Society only a month prior on the idea that the fourth dimension was not time but an actual fourth measurement of space. According to Professor Newcomb’s theory, if you had a fourth dimension of space, there is room for an indefinite number of universes, all along side of each other, as there is for an indefinite number of sheets of paper when they are piled one upon each other. I found in a speech written by Stephen Baxter and presented at Imperial College on February 4, 1996, that Professor Simon Newcomb actually did give this speech in December of 1893 to the New York Mathematical Society. H.G. Wells had read this speech as he was writing this novel and used this other theory in two later The ideas the story presents of the future of the human race are fascinating and imaginative and really make this a great story. When the time traveler gets his time machine working, he takes off into the future. He sees the seasons change, the landscape change, buildings go up and come down, and the sun travel across the sky so fast, it looks like a solid band of light traveling from east to west. When he pulled the lever and finally came to a stop in the future, he was in the year 802,701 AD. As the time traveler was out exploring, his time machine disappeared and he was forced to spend a few days and nights in this future age and during this time he discovered two different races of The first he encounters are the Eloi. He describes the first Eloi he came in contact with in this way, “He was a slight creature - perhaps four feet high - clad in a purple tunic, girdled at the waist with a leather belt. Sandals or buskins - I could not clearly distinguish which - were on his feet; his legs were bare to the knees, and his head was bare... He struck me as being a very beautiful and graceful creature, but indescribably frail. His flushed face reminded me of the more beautiful kind of consumptive - that hectic beauty of which we used to hear so much.’ ‘In another moment we were standing face to face, I and this fragile thing out of futurity. He came straight up to me and laughed into my eyes. The absence from his bearing any sign of fear struck me at once. He came a step forward, hesitated, and then touched my hand. Then I felt other soft little tentacles upon my back and shoulders. Indeed there was something in these pretty little people that inspired confidence - a graceful gentleness, a certain childlike ease. And besides, they looked so frail that I could fancy myself flinging the whole dozen of them about like nine-pins.’ ‘And then, looking more nearly into their features, I saw some further peculiarities in their Dresden-china type of prettiness. Their hair, which was uniformly curly, came to a sharp end at the neck and cheek; there was not the faintest suggestion of it on the face, and their ears were singularly minute. The mouths were small, with bright red, rather thin lips, and the little chins ran to a point.”(27-28) The time traveler goes on to describe the Eloi as very child-like in their thinking and behavior. They seemed almost indifferent and uninterested. For example, the Eloi really don’t concentrate on Another example from the story that illustrates the Eloi is the time that one of them almost drowns. The time traveler relates the event. “It happened that, as I was watching some of the little people bathing in a shallow, one of them was seized with a cramp and began drifting downstream. The main current ran rather swiftly, but not too swiftly for even a moderate swimmer. It will give you an idea, therefore, of the strange deficiency in these creatures, when I tell you that none made the slightest attempt to rescue the weakly crying little thing which was drowning before their eyes.”(52) The time traveler rescues the girl from drowning, whose name is Weena. Weena kind of attaches herself to the time traveler and is sort of a friend. Weena tags along with the time traveler whenever she can. The time traveler even mentions later in the story that he plans on taking Weena back in time with him. This is the part of the book were the second race a “people” is introduced. The author introduces them in a horror story way, by giving just brief, mysterious glimpses of these monsters at first and then describing them more completely later on. The first knowledge the time traveler gains of the Morlocks, as they are called, is by a chance encounter. The time traveler was looking for some shelter from the hot sun in the ruins of a building of some kind. The time traveler explains it this way, “I entered it groping, for the change from light to blackness made spots of colour swim before me. Suddenly I halted spellbound. A pair of eyes, luminous by reflection of the daylight without, was watching me out of the darkness.... I put out my hand and touched something soft. At once the eyes darted sideways, and something white ran past me. I turned with my heart in my mouth, and saw a queer little ape-like figure, its head held down in a peculiar manner, running across the sunlit space behind me. It blundered against a block of granite, staggered aside, and in a moment was hidden in a black shadow beneath another pile of ruined masonry. My impression of it is, of course, imperfect; but I know it was a dull white, and had strange large greyish-red eyes; also there was flaxen hair on its head and down its back.”(56-57) The time traveler then chased after the Morlock and said “It was so like a human spider!”(57) when it retreated down a shaft into the earth. The time traveler figures the Morlocks to be subterranean creatures. He says the light gleaming off the big, glassy eyes of the Morlock reminded him of the eyes of nocturnal animals. The time traveler goes down one of these shafts into the earth to see what he can learn. He heard the thumping of large machinery he assumed was to circulate air into the underground tunnels. He saw a large piece of meat on a table and smelt blood. He used matches to find his way around and to keep the Morlocks away from him. Whenever a match would go out, Morlocks would slowly gather around him, gently grabbing at him. He got the sick feeling that they were trying to keep him down there, possibly to make Once the time traveler had learned this much about the two races, he was able to come up with a theory as to how man kind, our descendants, had become this way. I think it is very entertaining and makes for good storytelling. “At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position. No doubt it will seem grotesque enough to you - and wildly incredible! - and yet even now there are existing circumstances to point that way. There is a tendency to utilize underground space for the less ornamental purposes of civilization; there is the Metropolitan Railway in London, for instance, there are new electric railways, there are subways, there are underground workrooms and restaurants, and they increase and multiply. Evidently, I thought, this tendency had increased till industry had gradually lost it’s birthright in the sky. I mean that it had gone deeper and deeper into larger and ever larger underground factories, spending a still-increasing amount of its time therein, till, in the end--!.... Again, the exclusive tendency of the richer people -- due no doubt, to the increasing refinement of their education, and the widening gulf between them and the rude violence of the poor - is already leading to the closing, in their interest, of considerable portions of the surface of the land.... And this same widening gulf- which is due to the length and expense of the higher educational process and the increased facilities for and temptations towards refined habits on the part of the rich - will make that exchange between class and class, that promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the splitting of our species along lines of social stratification, less and less frequent. So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour. Once they were there, they would no doubt have to pay rent, and not a little of it, for the ventilation of their caverns; and if they refused, they would starve or be suffocated for arrears. Such of them as were so constituted as to be miserable and rebellious would die; and, in the end, the balance being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the conditions of underground life, and as happy in their way, as the Upper-world people were to theirs.”(60-61) This is how the human race became divided. Through the many years, both physical and mental characteristics of both the Upper-world and Under-world dwellers changed. The Morlocks grew accustomed to the dark with their big eyes and the Eloi allowed got lazier and grew more dependent on the Morlocks for clothing and food. Right before the time travel left the future to go back to his own time, he was sitting on a hill watching the Eloi frolicking in a field and a realization came to him that made him shudder. “I understood now what all the beauty of the Over-world people covered. Very pleasant was their day, as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the field. Like the cattle, they knew of no enemies and provided against no needs. And their end was the same.”(97) Before the time traveler went back, the Another part of this story that makes it so good is the ending. The ending of the book really gets your imagination going. The time traveler gathers up a camera and some other supplies and tells the narrator of the story he is going to set off into the future again and this time bring back some pictures and specimens and proof of time travel. The narrator happens to catch a glimpse of the time traveler as he speeds off into the future again. The story ends with the narrator wondering what happened to the time traveler because he has been gone three years and nobody has seen nor heard from him. The first thing I thought was that something definitely happened to the time traveler because he would have reappeared right after he left the second time because he knew the narrator of the story was standing right there. He could have set his dials to that exact moment in time so he could show the narrator all the cool stuff he brought back from the future or What if it really were possible to travel through time? What would the possibilities be? The ideas presented in this story are very entertaining and imaginative. From what I gathered while researching this novel and the time period in which it was written, the author, H.G. Wells, incorporated new ideas about science and physics into this story. It is not hard to see why this story is considered classic science fiction more than one hundred years after it was first published. This story is great because it sparks your imagination and persuades you to consider the mysteries of science and time travel. Bibliography: Wells, H.G. The Time Machine. New York: Bantam 1991. Baxter, Stephen. Wild Extravagant Theories: The Science of The Time Machine. Paper for Picocon 13, Imperial College, 4 February 1996 Word Count: 2561
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