269 Years of Time Travel
A brief history of the subject, in both science and fiction, with help from the TV and film experts of Comedy Central's Beat the Geeks, Paul Goebel and Marc Heuck.

by Courtesy of Dreamworks
PHYSICS | FICTION | |
1733 | Memoirs of the Twentieth Century-An angel brings back a document from 1998. Samuel Madden’s book is part of time-travel fiction trend originating in utopian literature. | |
1895 | _The Time Machine_- H.G. Wells offers the idea that technology can transport a person through the 4th dimension. | |
1905 | Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. Time is not separate from space, but bound up with it, and flows at different speeds depending on how fast you’re moving. | |
1915 | Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity brings gravity into the equations. The next year, Karl Schwartzchild predicts the possibility of black holes. | |
1933 | Alley Oop-V.T. Hamlin’s caveman hero debuts in the comics; by end of the decade he’s touring history courtesy of Doc Wonmug’s time machine. | |
1935 | Einstein and Nathan Rosen uncover possibility of portals through space-time, opening a Pandora’s box of paradoxes that has yet to be resealed. | |
1937 | The Star Wagon– Maxwell Anderson’s time travel play, shot for TV three decades later with Dustin Hoffman and Orson Bean. | |
1949 | Mathematician Kurt Gdel, using Einstein’s equations, realizes that a spinning universe allows for time travel. | |
1952 | A Sound of Thunder-Seminal Ray Bradbury story in which time traveler goes dinosaur-hunting courtesy of Time Safari Inc., kills a butterfly, and accidentally triggers history-changing havoc in the present. | |
1957 | John Wheeler coins the term wormhole. Thank you card from sci-fi writers never received. | |
1959 | Twilight Zone-Rod Serling’s moody series taps time travel theme for many episodes, including “Execution” and ” The Last Flight.” | |
1960 | George Pal-directed version of The Time Machine, starring Rod Taylor, who battles thuggish Morlocks in the far future, falls for docile Eloi tribe member Weena, and, at film’s end, decides to move permanently to the ignorant Eloi era with a few choice educational texts. | |
1963 | Roy Kerr postulates that spinning black holes can act as time machines. Evidence later found that all black holes spin. | First episode of Dr. Who, BBC TV series that ran until 1989, detailing travels of a renegade Time Lord. |
1965 | Star Trek pilot-King of all TV sci-fi series laid the groundwork for decades of time travel, wormhole negotiation, and the like. | |
1968 | Planet of the Apes-Launch of durable film and TV franchise that monkeys with evolution, shocks with Statue of Liberty ending. Rod Serling wrote part of first script. | |
1969 | Slaughterhouse Five-Kurt Vonnegut’s masterly war novel explores Dresden horror and nature of time itself, via hero Billy Pilgrim. | |
1972 | The first discovery of a black hole, Cygnus X-1. | |
1974 | Frank Tipler discovers that an infinitely long spinning cylinder can be used as a time machine. Searches for one have been unsuccessful. | |
1978 | Christopher Reeve as Superman, reversing rotation of the Earth to go back in time and save Lois Lane. | |
1980 | Somewhere in Time-Christopher Reeve again, this time as a playwright who wishes himself back in time to romance a famous stage actress from the early 1900s. | |
1981 | Time Bandits-A suburban boy goes on a time travel adventure with dwarves who have “borrowed” a map of the universe’s time holes from God. | |
1984 | The Terminator-Arnold as a killer android, sent back in time (nude, for some reason) to find clothes and then kill the mother of the future savior of mankind. In T2, he came back as the good guy. | |
1985 | Cosmic strings first precisely described by J. Richard Gott III and William Hiscock. Many cosmologists think these superdense threads formed shortly after the Big Bang. | _Contact_-Carl Sagan’s novelBack to the Future-A classic. Says Marc Edward Heuck of Beat the Geeks: “Effective because it describes both the responsibility and benign wishes of time travel. Going back can create changes, but there is always the possibility of damage control.” |
1988 | Kip Thorne publishes recipe for general- purpose time machine. Ingredient list includes wormholes and negative energy. | |
1989 | Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure-Time travel yields excellent term paper for stoner kids. Time machine looks like a phone booth and it works, George Carlin tells the boys, by “modern technology.” | |
1991 | Cosmic string time machine proposed by J. Richard Gott III. While beautiful, it is as practical as all preceding time machines, which is to say, not very. | |
1995 | 12 Monkeys-Terry Gilliam film brilliantly explores the paradoxes. | |
2001 | Planet of the Apes-Remake finishes with mighty puzzling Ape Lincoln shot. | |
2002 | The Time Machine-Remake with Guy Pearce slated for March release. Directed by H.G. Wells’ great-grandson, Simon. |