A man, dazed from running into a temporal snag, appears in a radio factory, whereupon (before returning to his own time) he makes a radio that’s actually a Twonky, which promptly gets shipped to a Mr. Kerry Westerfield, who is initially quite confounded and amazed at everything it does.

Because of the story’s opening, I’m convinced the Twonky is from the future. The “temporal snag” that brought it to 1942 feels like an unexpected time rift to me, although the route back to the future is an intentional journey via an unexplained method.

Once again, drunken genius Gallegher invents something without knowing that he has done so. This time around, it’s a box that swallows things up until they reappear at now + x.

A scientist in the far future sends back two boxes of educational toys to test his time machine. One is discovered by Charles Dodgson’s niece in the 19th century, and the other by two children in 1942.

This story was in the first book that I got from the SF Book Club in the summer of 1970, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume 1 (edited by Robert Silverberg). I read and reread those stories until the book fell apart.

A futuristic old man asks the taxi dispatcher specifically for Denny Holt’s cab. When the man gets in the cab, he offers Denny $1000 to protect him from pursuit for just one night and to steal a brown notebook with a secret formula from the War Department.

Reporter Tim Carmichael visits Peter Talley, a shopkeeper on Park Avenue who provides things that his select clientele will need in the future.

I don’t always include prescience stories in my list, but like Heinlein’s “Life-Line,” this one is an exception, both because of the origin of Peter Talley’s prescience and because it was made into episodes of Tales of Tomorrow (the TV show) and [work-142 | The Twilight Zone[/ex].

A jilted man plans murderous revenge while trying to avoid any behavior that would reveal his plans to the government’s all-seeing technology that can reconstruct the past from electromagnetic and sound waves.

Rod Serling does an admirable job translating the original story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore to the small screen. The story’s two main incidents (the scissors and the shoes) come through with little change. In this version, the curious shopkeeper has become a street vendor, and the man who’s interested in the vendor’s goods is now a darker lowlife than the original newspaperman. Also, the science fiction aspect has been replaced by psychic precognition, solidly in the realm of fantasy, but not quite into weird fiction.

The people of the future are dying, so they send time-traveling dolls back to 2007 where they can communicate only with sappy Seattle children.