In which H. G. Wells’s third foray into time travel finalizes the story of our favorite unnamed Traveller and his machine, all in the form that we know and love.

The two earlier forays were The Chronic Argonaut (which was abandoned after three installments in his school magazine) and seven fictionalized National Observer essays (which sketched out the Traveller and his machine, including a glimpse of the future and proto-Morlocks). The story of The Time Machine itself had three 1895 iterations:

[list][*]A five-part serial in the January through May issues of New Review, The serial contains mostly the story as we know it, but with an alternate chunk in the introduction where the Traveller discusses free will, predestination, and a Laplacian determinism of the universe.

In addition, material from Chapter XIII of the serial (just over a thousand words beginning partway through the first paragraph of page 577 and continuing to page 579, line 29) were omitted from later editions. This section was written for the serial after a back-and-forth written struggle between Wells and New Review editor William Henley. The material had a separate mimeographed publication by fan and Futurian Robert W. Lowndes in 1940 as “The Final Men” and has since had multiple publications elsewhere with varying titles such as “The Gray Man.”[/*]

[*]The US edition: The Time Machine: An Invention, by H. G. Wells (erroneously credited as H. S. Wells in the first release), Henry Holt [publisher], May 1895. This edition may have been completed before the serial, as it varies from the serial more so than the UK edition. It does not contain the extra material in the first chapter or “The Final Men” (although it does have a few additional sentences at that point of Chapter XIII).[/*]

[*]The UK edition: The Time Machine: An Invention,by H. G. Wells, William Heinemann [publisher], May 1895. This edition is a close match to the serial, with the exception of chapter breaks, the extra material in the first chapter, and “The Final Men” (omitted from what is now Chapter XIV).[/*]
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After Susie Barton’s husband invested their nest egg in Time Ferry Services, Ltd., it appears that the only way she’ll ever get anything out of it is by giving a performance in Elizabethan times.

This is the earliest appearance of a time machine—the “Time Ball”—in film that we know of. And based on the name Time Ferry Services, Ltd, it may also be the earliest film mention of a time travel agency.

In fifteen episodes, Brick travels to the moon to protect a rocket interceptor while his pals take the time top to the 18th century to find a critical hidden formula.

A midwestern professor tells a half-drunken story of time travel and the real cause of the dinosaur extinction.

The Traveller now has a name—H. George Wells (played by Rod Taylor)—and Weena has the beautiful face and talent of Yvette Mimieux.

Before George Pal’s version of The Time Machine hit the silver screen, actual time machines were a rarity in film. But afterwards, even Moe, Larry, and Curly could throw one together in an afternoon to take them, their pal Schuyler, and their Lady friend Diane back to ancient Greece where, among other things, they restore Ulysses to the crown, kill a pair of conjoined Cyclopes, impersonate Hercules, and attract the wrath of the real Hercules.

Side note: The trio of stooges are also the first time travelers we’ve seen in film who fret over changing the course of history. Who woulda thunk?

Zarrko, a mad time-machine-building scientist from 2262, believes that our nuclear weapons will enable him to take over the world of his time. He comes back to 1962 to steal one, and the Mighty Thor pursues him back to 2262.

The plot suffers from Alpha Centauri syndrome, where the time traveler might as well be from Alpha Centauri as from the future, but seeing the emergence of Kirby’s high-perspective artwork gives this issue a boost. In addition, the story provides a powerful image of the pre-Vietnam cold war era and its prevailing assumptions about the roles of women in society.

Two decades after the end of World War II, Nazi Professor Ernst Von Hauser builds a time machine in the backwoods of Texas, and he’s got a plan to use it to change the outcome of the war: Start by bringing Confederate soldiers to the present; kidnap a wandering majorette; and finally send that nosy reporter Jim Crandell and his sidekick singer Sandy De Mar back to the past before bringing them back to be imprisoned.

As you may know, in the 1960s, the best way to present this kind of story was through an hour of snail-paced police procedural followed by detailed lectures from the mad professor. Oh, and also be sure to also send the majorette on a brief trip to the future, and keep a close eye on that brave Egyptian slave.

A group of secretive scientists develop time travel near Idaho’s Craters of the Moon, discovering a near-future apocalypse. Since anyone much over age 20 can’t survive traveling, they’re in the process of sending a group of young people, including Isa and her withdrawn sister Karen, beyond the apocalypse to rebuild civilization. Things go wrong (not the least of which are the plot, the dialogue, the acting, the sound track, and the requirement that the young Jane Fonda lookalikes must strip to travel through time), but even so, the film has a certain unprepossessing appeal.

For me, the update to the 1970s took this made-for-TV movie too far away from the original novel. For example, the Traveller (now a rocket scientist called Neil Perry) explains the workings of the machine with gibberish, whereas the original Traveller expressed himself with up-to-date mathematical terminology. The travel to the Salem witch trials and the California gold rush were also off the mark, as was the dreamy Weena who immediately speaks English.

Apart from the hero in The Time Machine movie (1960), this is the earliest that I’ve seen of the H.G.‑Wells-as-time-traveler subgenre. Our hero chases Jack the Ripper into the 20th century.

You’ll enjoy this story, but I’ll give away no more beyond the quote below. By the way, if you get the original publication, you’ll also see Kurt Vonnegut and Marilyn Monroe.

After the death of his wife and child, Dr. Scott McKenzie stumbles upon a tintype photograph from the Old West showing three corpses, a shooter, and a modern Magnum 357, leading him to develop a theory of time travel that is confirmed when a beautiful woman from the future appears and takes him back to the Old West to chase the shooter, save President Cleveland, and pursue other obvious plot developments.

Spoiler: At the end, I believe that Georgia uses her time crystal to send Scott back for a do-over on the day of his family’s death. This is disappointing since up until that point, the film has set up a perfect example of a single, nonbranching timeline.

Tasco Magnon, time traveler, decides to take his new bride on his next trip through time—a quest to find the mythical Knot in Time—where the two of them get trapped, and only one can return.

After Smith’s death in 1966, the story was completed by his wife, Genevieve Linebarger, and sold to Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Vision, but that anthology was endlessly delayed. So in 1987, a translated version of the story was published in a French collection of Smith’s stories, and that was the first published version (although we’ve listed it as an English story, since that’s how it was written). The English version was finally published in Smith’s 1993 complete short science fiction collection by NESFA. By then, Ellison’s rights to the story had expired, although that didn’t stop him from suing NESFA.

In exactly 100 words, Madison goes back in time to meet himself at the turning point of his young life.

Thanks to Marc Richardson for sending this one to me.

The Two Great Ones, Bill S. Preston, Esq., and Ted “Theodore” Logan, are the subjects of time-traveler Rufus’s mission, but instead they end up using his machine to write a history report to save their band, Wyld Stallyns.

Bradbury himself wrote the teleplay for this first on-screen adaptation of his famous story, and somehow he managed to do it without the word “butterfly” appearing in the script (though we do see the critter at the end).

Doc Brown takes Marty and Jennifer from 1985 to 2015 to save their children from a bad fate, but the consequences pile up when Biff also gets in on the time-travel action.

Marty and 1955-Doc travel back to the Old West where 1985-Doc is trapped along with various Biff ancestors and a possible love interest for Doc.

At the end of Bradbury’s adaptation of his own earlier story, he adds a holo-twist that viewers of The Ray Bradbury Theater may have enjoyed.

Two Evil Robots from the future are out to destroy Bill & Ted and their babes. After all that, the Two Great Ones begin a journey that starts with Death and ends with Two Little Ones.

A physicist with a dead girlfriend experiences various precognition episodes leading up to his attempt to travel to the past to undead the girlfriend, or at least plant the seeds for the precognition.

Jameson is a jerk. He pretends to love his mother, with whom he shares a house. He discovers time travel via a Legoland Time Machine and uses it to destroy women who “dumped” him. Yep, this guy is a real “winner.”

Fiddles had not yet been invented during Nero’s time. So just how did that rumor get started?

Story checks out. We played the film backward and it’s identical to running it forward. And a form of time travel where one of the characters experiences time running backward. We won’t spoil things by telling you which character.

Each installment of Andy and Terry’s Treehouse series sees the house grow upward, but what if the house never had a proper building permit? No problem, if you’ve got a time machine in a wheelie trash bin! Caution: Important detours along the way may be necessary to save antkind and The Time Machine.

Superhero teens Phoebe and Max and their younger siblings have heard their parents tell a hometown hero legend once too often, so they “borrow” Cousin Blobbin’s time machine to find out the truth. But they manage to screw up the past and create a disaster in their own time, so they have to make a second round trip to sort it all out.

And just for fun . . . we get to see a flying pig three times! [Sadly, we have no Flying Pig tag. —the curator]

When Debbie breaks up with often-clueless physics genius Stillwell, he does the normal thing and invents a time machine for him and his friend to go back and fix every wayward relationship moment.

You head out on a quick, rollicking ride back through time, with an unknown pursuer and an ambiguous conclusion.