Time Travel in Wells' The Time Machine

The idea of the time machine may have become a permanent fixture in the world's imagination after the publication of H. G. Wells's classic novel The Time Machine. His time machine was a simple one; two levers controlled it. One sent it into the future, the other into the past. Exactly how the machine was able to travel through time was never described in detail, but then Wells's book was a work of imagination, not fact.

At the beginning of the novel, the time traveler shows a small model of his machine to a group of friends. He then sends it on a one-way trip through time to demonstrate that the machine is real. One friend asks if it has traveled to the future.

The time traveler replies: "Into the future or the past--I don't, for certain, know which."

Another friend says, "I presume that it has not moved in space, and if it traveled into the future it would still be here all this time...."

But that friend's guess--that the machine travels in time but not in space--is one important reason why time machines seem to be impossible.

They are also impossible as shown in the movie Back to the Future.