The Big List of Time Travel Adventures

 1844 to 1849

An 1867 issue of Godey’s

   “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”
by Edgar Allan Poe
First publication: Godey’s Lady’s Book, Apr 1844

A sick man tells of a walk he took in November of 1845 only to find himself in a pitched battle in 1780 Calcutta, but Dr. Templeton, who listens to the story, already knows how it turns out.

 Busied in this, I walked on for several hours, during which the mist deepened around me to so great an extent that at length I was reduced to an absolute groping of the way. And now an indescribable uneasiness possessed me— 

Edgar Allan Poe, Master Traveller

Poe’s creativity and innovation was stronger in his horror stories than his ventures into time travel, but even so, he deserves his Master Traveller Citation for the first instance of a time traveler visiting—and affecting!—a historical event. Yet the effect on the event is not a change: Indeed, he caused it to happen in exactly the way that history recorded, resulting in the first of a long line of stories time-travel stories in a single-stream universe in which a traveler may go to the past and do various actions, but only if he did in fact do them all along.






   Le monde tel qu’il sera
English title: The World as It Shall Be (translated from French)
by Émile Souvestre
First publication: 1846

Mssr. John Progrès, a diminutive god, whisks a young romantic couple to a satirical anti-utopia in the year 3000.

 He was comfortably seated on a machine of English Make, the smoke of which enveloped him in clouds of fantastic shape, and on the instrument panel there was a daguerreotype from the workshops of M. le Chevalier. Maurice, a little alarmed at first at this sudden apparition, was reassured by his mild appearance. He looked boldly at the little visitor and asked him who he was. 

Émile Souvestre, Master Traveller

As you can see by O. Penguilly’s drawing, Émile Souvestre came within half a screwdriver’s turn of inventing the time machine, but the steam-powered machine that Progrès rides seems to be merely a means of transport through space. When it comes to taking the couple through time, that’s accomplished via sleep. So no credit for devising the first time machine, but I’ll give him credit for inventing Steampunkers of the Year 3000, and that’ll be the basis of his Master Traveller Citation.




   “Mellonta Tauta”
aka On Board Balloon “Skylark”
by Edgar Allan Poe
First publication: Godey’s Lady’s Book, Feb 1849

So just how did those letters from the year 2848 make their way back to Poe if not for time travel?

 To the Editors of the Lady’s Book:—

I have the honor of sending you, for your magazine, an article which I hope you will be able to comprehend rather more distinctly than I do myself. It is a translation, by my friend, Martin Van Buren Mavis, (sometimes called the “Toughkeepsie Seer,”) of an odd-looking MS. which I found, about a year ago, tightly corked up in a jug floating in the Mare Tenebrarum—a sea well described by the Nubian geographer, but seldom visited now-a-days, except for the transcendentalists and divers for crotchets. 


 

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Thanks for visiting my time-travel page, and thanks to the many sources that provided stories and more (see the Links and Credits in the menu at the top). —Michael (main@colorado.edu)