I) What is the shape? (A kind of empty Frame in Wells). More generally, what would it look like?

2) What are the materials? They don’t have to be known substances, but you have to be able to describe them.

3) Do you turn it on and off? If so, how? (Removable levers in Wells). Do you have to get in it, as in Wells, or does it work some other way?

4) How do you control your destination in time, if you do? (Dials that show time rolling by and adjustment of levers in Wells)

5) What is the experience of moving from one time to another? (Wells describes this in detail, as a kind of high-speed jarring as the traveler sees days/months/years/decades/centuries roll by at great speed.)

MAKE YOUR OWN TIME MACHINE (It should strive to be “techy” and not just a copy of one you already know)

Hot Tub Time Machine

Back the Future (Lamborghini posters)

What changes must now occur in our way of looking at things, in our notions! Even the elementary concepts of time and space have begun to vacillate. Space is killed by the railways and we are left with time alone. . . . Now you can travel to Orleans in four and a half hours. . . . I feel as if the mountains and forests of all countries were advancing on Paris. Even now I can smell the German Linden trees; the North Sea’s breakers are rolling against my door.Heinrich Heine, Lutezia, 1854

[S]upposing that railroads . . . were to be suddenly established all over England . . . the whole population of the country would . . . sit nearer to one another by two-thirds of the time which now separates them. . . . If the rate were to be sufficiently accelerated, this process would be repeated; our harbors our dockyards, our towns, the whole of our rural population, would again . . . draw nearer to each other by two-thirds. As distances were thus annihilated, the surface of our country would, as it were, shrivel in size until it became not much bigger than one immense city.Quarterly Review, 1839. P. 22

Space, Time and the Railroad

“There is a pulling at the eyeballs on looking out of the window; a jarring noise, the compound of the continuous noise of wheels, and this conducted into the framework of the compartment, with the obligato of whistle and of the brake dashing in occasionally and always carrying some element of annoyance, surprise, or shock; there is the swaying of the train from side to side, or the jolting over uneven rails or ill-adjusted points; and the general effect of these upon the temper, the muscles and the moral natue. . . . There are impressions that are made and that unavoidably, by the very conditions of the journey; and they involve fatigue. The eyes are strained, the ears are dinned, the muscles are jostled hither and thither, and the nerves are worried by the attempt to maintain order, and so comes weariness.”Russell Reynolds, “Travelling: Its Influence on Health,” in The Book of Health, ed. Malcolm Morris, 1884

The Experience of Rail Travel

Columbian Exposition, 1893—Court of Honor

Any man who has stood at twelve o'clock at the single narrow door-way, which serves as the place of exit for the hands employed in the great cotton-mills, must acknowledge, that an uglier set of men and women, of boys and girls, taking them in the mass, it would be impossible to congregate in a smaller compass. Their complexion is sallow and pallid--with a peculiar flatness of feature, caused by the want of a proper quantity of adipose substance to cushion out the cheeks. Their stature low--the average height of four hundred men, measured at different times, and different places, being five feet six inches. Their limbs slender, and playing badly and ungracefully. A very general bowing of the legs. Great numbers of girls and women walking lamely or awkwardly, with raised chests and spinal flexures. Nearly all have flat feet, accompanied with a down-tread, differing very widely from the elasticity of action in the foot and ankle, attendant upon perfect formation. Hair thin and straight--many of the men having but little beard, and that in patches of a few hairs, much resembling its growth among the red men of America. A spiritless and dejected air, a sprawling and wide action of the legs, and an appearance, taken as a whole, giving the world but "little assurance of a man," or if so, "most sadly cheated of his fair proportions..."

P. Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England. London, 1833, pp.161-162, 202-203

Addie Card, 12 years of age, Spinner in cotton Mill in VT, c 1910

In some cotton mills, 50% of workers were 10 yrs old or younger.

Lewis Hine, Child Laborers in Glassworks c. 1910