The Time Machine

[october]

What is the plot of H.G. Wells' famous story "The Time Machine?"

-october-

 

[CornMaster]

This guy...builds a time machine.

Then he goes forward in time.

And then he goes EVEN FARTHER in time, until the Earth is empty (possibly destroyed)

I think....I've never actually read the book.

 

[duke o' york]

This site should help you: plot summary

 

[Knight-Dragon]

Vaguely remember these people built a time machine and travelled to the future. There they found a fair human race living above ground and a hideous humanoid race living beneath the earth.

Turns out the crude humanoids living beneath the earth were descendants of humans too, forced to live underground. And also the above race is now food for the savages below.

Or something like that. I could be wrong......

 

[WarVoid]

Pfff, amateurs.

Victorian traveller (referred to as "George" in the movie with Rod Taylor) travels to the future where he finds a utopian Earth. There is no need for food and the climate as well as nature have been tamed to be a veritable Garden of Eden.

However, he soon finds the childlike Eloi and the strange underground dwelling Morlocks. It turns out both races are human. After a great final war (armageddon) the Eloi stayed above ground to try and rebuild while the Morlocks went underground. Centuries of adaption and mutation later, the Morlocks came to rule over the Eloi and breed them like cattle.

In a final fight with the Morlocks, George destorys their civilisation and travels back in time. He stops midway between the future of the Eloi and his own time to find the great war they had spoken of. The world is divided after a global government called the World Science Governing Board breaks into two factions; Northdom and Southdom. They also have knowledge of time machines but have banned them for fear of creating a rip in the space and time continum. One man tries to go back in time with George's machine with machivellian plans for ruling the world. George foils his attempts and travels back to the Victorian era of his own time.

Here he relays his fantastic story to his friends and then, when they don't believe him and leave, he takes a few books and heads back into the future to be with his girlfriend Weena and the Eloi to help rebuild human civilisation.

Wells' leaves the rest up to the imagination.

 

[Ohwell]

D-oh!

I saw the movie... it was pretty cool. I think the book did not contain the parts about how the guy went into the world war three... and he had to keep going ahead in time to wait for the rock to erode.

The movie only contains the part about the Eloi and Marlocks, not the next part.

 

[sgrig]

I wonder how HG Wells thought of something like of Armageddon? Was it inspired by the Bible or something, or he really envisioned that a war between humans could result in very big changes to humanity?

 

[allan]

Were nuclear weapons understood in theory in the Victorian era? The idea that splitting an atom would release huge amounts of energy?

 

[Knight-Dragon]

Originally posted by allan
Were nuclear weapons understood in theory in the Victorian era? The idea that splitting an atom would release huge amounts of energy?

A definite no. The barest atomic research only got started after the turn of the century and atomic weopans research only really got serious during the course of WW2.

 

[allan]

"The barest atomic research only got started after the turn of the century and atomic weopans research only really got serious during the course of WW2."

I meant theories. Back in that era, did scientists understand, for example, how the sun produces its energy? Not that they had any idea how to go about reproducing this process, but did they have theoretical knowledge of it? That of course is fusion, but was there any theories at the time about the energy that holds atomic particles together (the "strong" force), and that (theoretically) if an atom were split apart, this energy would be released--i.e. fission? I'm not sure when the existence of subatomic particles was first hypothesized, maybe it is in fact more recent than I think. But I would think it would've been long before we actually figured out how to split an atom.

I never read the novel--just saw the original classic movie--so I don't know what kind of weaponry was imagined by Welles as nearly destroying the human race. But in the movie there was an alarm that was sounded that the Morlocks used to lure the Eloi underground, and an "all clear" signal when enough Eloi went underneath--sounds like Welles imagined some weapon that would produce either radiation or some pestulance (or maybe poison gas?), that humans were conditioned to go underground when the sirens sounded.

Just like "warp technology" and other creations of modern science fiction, supposedly based on theoretical knowledge but far from actual implementability....

 

[sgrig]

Originally posted by allan
"The barest atomic research only got started after the turn of the century and atomic weopans research only really got serious during the course of WW2."

I meant theories. Back in that era, did scientists understand, for example, how the sun produces its energy? Not that they had any idea how to go about reproducing this process, but did they have theoretical knowledge of it? That of course is fusion, but was there any theories at the time about the energy that holds atomic particles together (the "strong" force), and that (theoretically) if an atom were split apart, this energy would be released--i.e. fission? I'm not sure when the existence of subatomic particles was first hypothesized, maybe it is in fact more recent than I think. But I would think it would've been long before we actually figured out how to split an atom.

Well, radioactivity was only discovered in 1896 by French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel. At that time physicists did know about atoms, but did not yet know what the atoms were made of. In 1897, J.J. Thomson discovered the electron and proposed the 'plum pudding' model of the atom, ie that an atom was one solid sphere with positive charge distributed uniformly thorughout it and electrons which carry negative charge are also distributed uniformly in this mass of positive charge. Before that it was thought that the atom was one undivisible thing (indeed the word 'atom' comes from Greek 'atomos' - indivisible).

In 1907 (I think!), Rutherford conducted his famous alpha scattering experiment, which has proven that the atom consists of a tiny nucleus which contains most of the atom's mass and all of its positive charge, and is surrounded by a cloud of negative charge (electrons). Hence disproving Thomson's theory

The first real nuclear reaction which was observed was in 1919, when Rutherford got alpha particles to collide with nitrogen nuclei, turning them into oxygen.

So I think before the 1900's no one would have ideas that an atom could be divided, getting energy out.

Actually, before Einstein's general relativity (1907-1916), it would've been impossible to theoretically predict energy output from fission or fusion reactions. The energy output depends on there being a difference in mass between original particles and resulting particles, which is released as energy, in accordance with Einstein's E=mc^2.

'The Time Machine' was written in 1895, ie just before the great discoveries were made in that field, so he certainly wouldn't have known about the possibility of nuclear weapons. However, late 19th century has seen massive developments in explosives and generally means of warfare, so maybe that's what made Wells envision a massively destructive war.

I still find it amazing, that 20 years before even WWI, Wells envisioned a war which could destroy humanity as we know it! 1

 

[allan]

Thanks for the crash course in the history of physics research.... I guess I imagined we knew of these things for longer than that, but I was never that well versed in the historical timeline of scientific progress. Perhaps the movie, which was made after the discoveries (not sure what year it came out, maybe it was even after the Manhattan Project), was adapted more to what was learned since the book was written. I guess I'll have to check out the novel at the local library to see what Welles himself envisioned....

 

[sgrig]

I think the film was made in the 1960's, at the height of cold war! So of course, nuclear war was quite a relevant topic then!

 

[october]

If I recall correctly, the novel for War of the Worlds did not contain the atomic bomb, but that was added for the movie made in 1953, which I just viewed for the first time since 1991.

-october-