Master
   Traveller

 But as I am determined to give ſuch Readers and all Men, ſo full, and fair, and convincing an Account of my ſelf and that celeſtial Spirit I receiv’d theſe Papers from, and to anſwer all Objections ſo entirely, as to put Ignorance, and even Malice it ſelf to Silence: I am confident, the ingenuous and candid part of the World, will ſoon throw off ſuch mean narrow ſpirited Suſpicions, as unjuſt and ungenerous. 

Samuel Madden, Master Traveller

For me, the important point is that the work is presented as a series of future letters that were delivered (time travel!) to the author by “an infallible Guide,” an angel who also served to aid in the translation of the unfamiliar 20th century English to that of the current times. Is this perhaps the first definitive instance of backward time travel?

Master
   Traveller

 Now my children! You wish to remake each other? Julie, you want your lover transformed into a more tender companion? And you Leander, you would rather that your Julie had a more aggressive bearing? 

Johan Herman Wessel, Master Traveller

I have read that the original play was so bad that scholars don’t even want to list it among Wessel’s works, and yet it has the first humans traveling forward in time! Most certainly deserving of a Master Traveller Citation. I am slowly working on a translation to English. Don’t hold your horses, because my understanding of idiomatic language is often confused.

Master
   Traveller

 To this question, the devil burst into laughter, waking them. The female ran about on all fours, carrying under her belly the little ones, clinging with all their might; but the male uttered a fierce gutteral roar, fixed his eyes upon me, stood upright on his hind legs, and raising high his flint ax, rushed toward me with a furious leap, swinging the deadly weapon at my head.
At that moment, I uttered a cry of terror because I had no choice but to recognize exactly what kind of monster he was . . . He was a man. 

—from the end of Part 1

Pierre Boitard, Master Traveller

This 1836 article is the earliest that I’ve spotted of a man traveling to the past. So cheers to Pierre and his well deserved Master Traveler Citation.

Master
   Traveller

 It must suffice then to say that, at the point where I come again into perfect possession of my consciousness, the venerable monk and I were conferring, in an easy manner, upon various points connected with his age, or with mine, and both of us having a clear understanding, and perfect recollection of the fact, that, at this same moment, he was actually living in the eighth century, and I as truly in the nineteenth; nor did this trifing difference of a thousand years or more—this break, as geologists would call it—this fault in the strata of time—perplex either of us a whit; any more than two friends are molested by the circumstance of their happening to encounter each other just as they arrive from opposite hemispheres. 

Anonymous Dublin University Author, Master Traveller

Here’s one time (of many) when I wish I did have a time machine so that I could go back to 1838 Dublin, track down the anonymous author of this story, and present him or her with a well-deserved Master Traveller Citation, which recognizes creative innovation in time travel. In his 1951 anthology, Far Boundaries, August Derleth identified this story as a forerunner of modern time travel fiction, and indeed, the hero of the story may be the first backward time-traveling human (given that Boitard’s 1836 version of Paris avant les hommes might not have included the time traveler). Even if Boitard was first, this story deserves a citation for being the first to travel back to visit an actual historical person.

The mechanism of travel in “Anachronism” is via a dream-like state, and at first there is the question of whether the traveler can interact with those in the past. But for me, the discussion he has with Saint Bede puts that question to bed and also guarantees the anonymous author a Master Traveler Citation.

Master
   Traveller

They walked along the road, Scrooge recognising every gate, and post, and tree; until a little market-town appeared in the distance, with its bridge, its church, and winding river. Some shaggy ponies now were seen trotting towards them with boys upon their backs, who called to other boys in country gigs and carts, driven by farmers. All these boys were in great spirits, and shouted to each other, until the broad fields were so full of merry music, that the crisp air laughed to hear it!  

Now if that’s not time travel, what is? Ah . . . “Not so fast!” says Ghost!

“These are but shadows of the things that have been,’ said the Ghost. “They have no consciousness of us.”  

Even Ghost Himself admits there’s no interaction with the past. Observation is permitted, but not interaction. They might as well be watching a movie! In general, if you can’t interact with the past and the past can’t see you, then that’s not time travel.

Fair enough, but what about Future Ghost? Isn’t He bringing information from the future to Scrooge? Transfer of information from the future to the past may be boring compared to people-jumping, but it is time travel, so A Christmas Carol must be granted membership in the list after all, don’t you think?

Ah, not so fast again! At one point, Scrooge asks a pertinent question:

“Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,” said Scrooge, “answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?”  

The answer is critical to whether time travel occurs. The difference between things that May Be and things that Will Be is like the difference between Damon Knight and Doris Day: Both are quite creative, but (as far as I know) there’s only one you go to for time travel.

The scary Future ghost never answers the question, and moreover, Scrooge appears intent on not having the future he sees come true. So, I want to say that Scrooge saw only a prediction or a prophecy or a vision of a possible future—none of which are time travel.

For many years, I stuck by my guns: Viewing the past is not time travel. Visions of a possible future are not time travel. Scrooge was not a time traveler. And yet, Dickens’ planted a seed wherein a major character seemed to go backward or forward in time and even more(!) return to the present, and that seed grew into the industry we now call time travel. For this reason and more, Scrooge and Marley and Tiny Tim, too, have earned their place on The Big List of Time Travel Adventures. So in my old age, perhaps wondering when my ghosts shall visit, I have new guidelines:

• Reconstructing the past from data that is readily available in the present is not time travel. But if a noninteractive vision of the past is presented with even the barest feeling of time travel, then such a story is awarded a spot on the Big List.
  
• Similarly, it’s possible to construct a prediction of the future from data in the present. If we lived in the pre-quantum world of classical physics, we could even strengthen the word prediction, claiming that we have computed what Leibnitz called “the possibility to calculate everything . . .” And yet, once again, I find that noninteractively viewing the future (or a possible future timeline) is sufficiently chrono-atypical that in the absense of any explicit calculating machinery, such stories are now liberally allowed on the Big List.

 If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die. 

Charles Dickens, Master Traveller

Given the evolution of my understanding of time travel described above, Dickens has sentenced me to many happy hours of additional work as the keeper of the Big List, for which I offer my thanks and now officially cite him as an undisputed Master Traveller.

Master
   Traveller

 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.

Master
   Traveller

 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.

 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. 

 If only we were still in the time of fairies and genies, maybe I could find one good enough to tell me what the world, or only France, or Paris, or even just the Tuileries Gardens was like, ten or twelve thousand years ago, more or less. 

 This charm of travelling would become perfect if we could travel in time as well as in space—if, like a character in one of Andersen’s fanciful stories, we could sometimes take a fortnight in the fifteenth century, or, still more pleasant, a leap in to the twenty-first. It is possible to accomplish this object more or less in imagination—not by reading historical novels, in which characters are always obtrusively reminding us of their nineteenth-century origin—but by a journey beyond the reach of railways and newpapers. Those are the links which always bind us down offensively to the present. The scream of an engine or a sheet of The Times carries us forcibly back to London from the ends of the earth. It is the rattling of the chain which reminds us that we are, after all, prisoners to certain conditions of space and time. But once beyond their influence we can shake ourselves fairly free. It is possible, indeed, to make “the forward flowing tide of time” recede a little too far. Sir Samuel Baker, when he was in the kingdom of Katchiba, must have felt that he was almost in a geological epoch. He was back in the period when, according to Mr. Darwin, man was just emerging out of the gorilla and learning to walk upon his hind legs. But a leap backwards for a century or two would be intensely enjoyable; and to those who can appreciate it, that is precisely the pleasure obtained by a journey in Transylvania. 

Master
   Traveller

 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.

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

Master
   Traveller

 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.

 According to the view of things above adverted to, the different stages in the history of our race are not successive only, but are also co-existent and co-extensive with each other. Just as in a block of marble, there is contained, not one only, but every possible statue, though, of the whole number, only one at a time can be made evident to our senses; so, in a given region of space, any number of worlds can co-exist, each with its own population conscious of only that world, or set of phenomena, to which their ego is attuned. 

Master
   Traveller

 “One step at a time,” argued a sensible voice. “If the Anacronópete aims to undo history, it seems to me that we must be congratulated as it allows us to amend our failures.”
   “Quite right,” called a married man jammed into the front of the bus, thinking of his tiresome wife. “As soon as the ticket office opens to the public, I’m booking passage to the eve of my wedding.” 

Enrique Gaspar, Master Traveller

Enrique Gaspar was a contemporary of H.G. Wells, though there’s no indication that Wells knew of his fellow European’s Spanish novel, El Anacronópete, the first tale of a scientist inventing a time machine—to be more specific, a flying time ship several stories high.

 Those who were there say that they saw Dr. Nebogipfel, standing in the toneless electric glare, on a peculiar erection of brass and ebony and ivory; and that he seemed to be smiling at them, half pityingly and half scornfully, as it is said martyrs are wont to smile. 

 It would have been reason enough, had there been no other, for abolishing money, that its possession was no indication of rightful title to it. In the hands of the man who had stolen it or murdered for it, it was as good as in those which had earned it by industry. People nowadays interchange gifts and favors out of friendship, but buying and selling is considered absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevolence and disinterestedness which should prevail between citizens and the sense of community of interest which supports our social system. According to our ideas, buying and selling is essentially anti-social in all its tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise above a very low grade of civilization. 

Master
   Traveller

 You know about transmigration of souls; do you know about transportation of epochs—and bodies? 

Mark Twain, Master Traveller

I first read the original in 7th grade: for me, a vast improvement on Huck Finn. I do see some roots of Robert A. Heinlein (a fellow Master Traveller) in the Connecticut Yankee’s political, economic and social machinations.

 “It goes, of course, at the usual rate. Only the time has to go with it. Hence, if I move the hands, I change the time. To move them forwards, in advance of the true time, is impossible: but I can move them as much as a month backwards—that is the limit. And then you have the events all over again—with any alterations experience may suggest.”
“What a blessing such a watch would be,” I thought, “in real life! To be able to unsay some heedless word—to undo some reckless deed! Might I see the thing done?”
“With pleasure!” said the good natured Professor. “When I move this hand back to here,” pointing out the place, “History goes back fifteen minutes!” 

 After a while turkeys got to be awfully scarce, selling for about a thousand dollars apiece. They got to passing off almost anything for turkeys—even half-grown hummingbirds. And cranberries—well they asked a diamond apiece for cranberries. All the woods and orchards were cut down for Christmas trees. After a while they had to make Christmas trees out of rags. But there were plenty of rags, because people got so poor, buying presents for one another, that they couldn't get any new clothes, and they just wore their old ones to tatters. They got so poor that everybody had to go to the poorhouse, except the confectioners, and the storekeepers, and the book-sellers, and they all got so rich and proud that they would hardly wait upon a person when he came to buy. It was perfectly shameful! 

 It seemed awful, and impossible, but the little green door led into the past, and Letitia Hopkins was visiting her great-great-great-grandfather and grandmother, great-great-grandmother, and her great-great-aunts. 

1. Time Travelling: Possibility or Paradox? (17 Mar 1894)  
2. The Time Machine (24 Mar 1894)  
3. A.D. 12,203: A Glimpse of the Future (31 Mar 1894)  
4. The Refinement of Humanity: A.D. 12,203 (21 Apr 1894)  
5. The Sunset of Mankind (28 Apr 1894)  
6. In the Underworld (19 May 1894)  
7. The Time-Traveller Returns (23 Jun 1894)  

 ‘Possibly not,’ said the Philosophical Inventor. ‘But now you begin to see the object of my investigations into the geometry of four dimensions. I have a vague inkling of a machine—’ 

 Suddenly a splendid hound dashed out of the mist in front, followed by another and another until half-a-dozen or more were bounding and leaping around the girl beside me. She caressed and quieted them with her gloved hand, speaking to them in quaint terms which I remembered to have seen in old French manuscripts. 

Master
   Traveller

 I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and went off with a thud. 

H.G. Wells, Master Traveller

In 1919, my Grandpa Main cited H.G. Wells as the inaugural recipient of the Master Traveller Citation recognizing innovative writers for their contributions to time travel.

 As once the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and straightaway coveted them, even so Bertram Ingledew looked on Freda Monteith and saw at the first glance she was a woman to be desired, a soul high throned, very calm and beautiful. 

 It was a case of the angels tumbling to the daughters of men. He saw at the first sight that she was a woman to be desired, a soul high-throned, very calm and dignified, yet scrumptious withal. Like the angels, he tumbled to her, and, falling from so great a height, was instantly mashed. 

 A thought seized me that by virtue of the powder I had grown backward through all the lifetimes of men, and was alone on the island with nothing but the brutes and the birds. 

 As he struggled to get his shirt over his head, he was struck with a brilliant idea. “Let me be in bed,” he said, and found himself so. “Undressed,’ he stipulated; and, finding the sheets cold, added hastily, ’and in my nightshirt—ho, in a nice soft woolen nightshirt. Ah!” he said with immense enjoyment. “And now let me be comfortably asleep . . .” 

 Space and Time are commensurable. To explore the universe by seeking knowledge of points in Space can be accomplished only through Time; and in order to measure Time quantita tively, we refer to Space intervals on the dial of a chronometer. Space and Time, being of the same nature, may be conceived of as different physical states of the same substance, or as differ ent modes of motion.