Adventures In The Fourth Dimension

Feb. 11, 2010 - PRLog -- In October 1895, the twenty-nine year old H.G.Wells was in the first flush of his fame and success. The Time Machine, serialised the previous year, had appeared in book form over the summer, and was heading for the Christmas bestseller lists on the back of reviews that were already proclaiming its author a ‘man of genius’. Publishers and magazines were scrabbling over the rights to his future work, and outlines and sketches for The Island of Dr.Moreau and War of the Worlds were being briskly circulated on both sides of the Atlantic. Robert W PaulBut the most curious approach that Wells received that month was from a designer of electrical and optical instruments named Robert W. Paul, inviting him to his offices at 44 Hatton Gardens to discuss a patent that he was developing to bring the Time Machine to life before the eyes of the paying public.

© Mike Jay, from http://mikejay.net/

What Paul had in mind was not strictly a movie, as the projected motion picture was yet to be invented: the Lumière Brothers’ historic Cinématographe exhibition at the Café de Paris would not take place until December 28 of that year. Yet in other respects it was far more than a movie, a multimedia extravaganza involving magic lanterns, viewing carriages, wind machines, flicker-strips and futuristic stage sets that remains unrealised even today. Like the Lumières – and indeed many technicians across Europe and America – Paul had the projected moving image in his sights, but his route of approach towards it was unique, and Wells’ concept of the Time Machine uniquely suited as its subject matter. For Paul had realised that he was attempting to do precisely what Wells’ protagonist, the Time Traveller, had done: design a device for travel in the fourth dimension.

Both the original serialisation and the novel of the Time Machine open with a Socratic dialogue led by the Time Traveller, arguing that time is the fourth dimension and that it is theoretically possible to travel in it just as we now travel in the other three. This preamble seems rather superfluous today, but it was speculative four-dimensional geometry that gave Wells the framing device and plot mechanics for his series of future visions, and in turn sold his readers on the assertion that the strange scenes that followed were not fantasies but predictions plausibly informed by cutting-edge science. The authority cited in the novel by the Time Traveller, the American astronomy professor Simon Newcomb’s lecture on the fourth dimension to the New York Mathematical Society in December 1893, had in fact been Wells’ own inspiration for a time-travelling device moving in ‘another dimension at right angles to the other three’.


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