The Big List of Time Travel Adventures

 1870 to 1882


No Time Travel. Move along.
  “Human Repetends” by Marcus Clarke, The Australasian, 14 Sep 1872 [no definite time travel ]


No Time Travel. Move along.
  “Who Is Russell?” by George Cary Eggleston, American Homes, Mar 1875 [supernatural story ]

  “The True Story of Bernard Poland’s Prophecy” by George Cary Eggleston, American Homes, Jun 1875 [visions of possible futures ]



   The Age of Science:
A Newspaper of the Twentieth Century
by Frances Power Cobbe (as by Merlin Nostradamus)
First publication: 1877

Published as a 50-page book, the story tells of the invention of the Prospective Telegraph and provides excerpts from a newspaper that it retrieves from a 1977 future dominated by scientific and medical super-nannies.

 By this truly wonderful invention (exquisitely simple in its machinery, yet of surpassing power) the obstacle of Time is as effectually conquered as that of Space has been for the last generation by the Electric Telegraph; and future years—even, it is anticipated, future centuries—will be made to respond to our call as promptly and completely as do now the uttermost parts of the earth wherewith the magic wire has placed us in communication. 

Frances Power Cobbe, Master Traveller

I place Frances Power Cobbe as the author of the first science fiction time travel story given that in her book a scientist invents a machine to retrieve information from the future—certainly an accomplishment worthy of a Master Traveller Citation.


The story was reprinted in this 1973 Mitchell collection.

   “An Uncommon Sort of Spectre”
by Edward Page Mitchell
First publication: The New York Sun, 30 Mar 1879

On the 1352 evening of the birth of quadruplets sons to the baroness of a Rhine castle, the baron himself entertains a traveler with memories of the coming 80 years.

 For you allow that, while ghosts out of the future are unheard of, ghosts from the past are not infrequently encountered. 




   “The Clock That Went Backward”
by Edward Page Mitchell
First publication: The New York Sun, 18 Sep 1881

A young man and his cousin inherit a clock that takes them back to the siege of Leyden at the start of October 1574, where they affect that time as much as it has affected them. This is travel in a machine (or at least an artifact), but they have no control over the destination.

 The hands were whirling around the dial from right to left with inconceivable rapidity. In this whirl we ourselves seemed to be borne along. Eternities seemed to contract into minutes while lifetimes were thrown off at every tick. 

Edward Page Mitchell, Master Traveller

In Lost Giants of American Science Fiction, sf historian Sam Moskowitz cites Mitchell as the first to spearhead five important sf themes in his anonymously published, syndicated short stories for the newspapers. One of those themes was the idea of a mechanism (rather than a dream or trance) to take a person back in time, as presented in “The Clock That Went Backward”—the first time machine! Another time travel innovation of Mitchell was the time traveling ghost from the future in “An Uncommon Sort of Spectre,” who unlike Dickens’s ghosts could interact with the time he traveled to.



No Time Travel. Move along.
  “Hands Off” by Edward Everett Hale (Anonymously), Harper’s, Mar 1881 [alternate history ]

  “Pausodyne” by Grant Allen, Belgravia Christmas Annual, Dec 1881 [long sleep ]

 

8 items are in the time-travel list for these search settings.
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)