The Big List of Time Travel Adventures

 Related to: Enoch Soames
 from antiquity to 2017

In the story—and in real life—William Rothestein drew this pastel portrait of Enoch Soames.

   “Enoch Soames:
A Memory of the Eighteen-Nineties”
by Max Beerbohm
First publication: The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, May 1916

Beerbohm (then an undergraduate at Oxford) feels something near to reverence toward the Catholic diabolist Enoch Soames, seeing as how the man from Preston has published one book of stories and has another book of poems forthcoming, but over time, Enoch himself becomes more and more morose and unsatisfied that he shall never see his own work appreciated in future years.

 A hundred years hence! Think of it! If I could come back to life THEN—just for a few hours—and go to the reading-room and READ! Or, better still, if I could be projected now, at this moment, into that future, into that reading-room, just for this one afternoon! I'd sell myself body and soul to the Devil for that! 




   Favorite Story
adapted by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
First time travel: 26 Jun 1946

Each week, a different personality would choose a favorite story to be dramatized on radio station KFI’s, Los Angeles, Favorite Story program hosted and narrated by actor True Boardman. They broadcast at least three time-travel tales, all adapted by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. In fact, the first time travel was also KFI’s first episode, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, selected by actor Ed Gardner. Another episode was bandleader Kay Kyser’s favorite, The Time Machine, which was the second radio script for the Wells classic, significantly abridged but more faithful than the 1948 Escape radio production.

More or less concurrently, the broadcasts were repackaged nationally for NBC radio by Ziv Syndication with Ronald Colman as host; there were also some new NBC episodes (not adapted by Lawrence and Lee) including A Christmas Carol, which as everyone knows has no real time travel. The KFI dates below are taken from ocrsite.com; the NBC dates (which ocrsite says were aired differently across the country) are from audio-classics.com. The selector for each story is also given in the list below.
  1. Connecticut Yankee (26 Jun 46 KFI / 23 Jul 46 NBC) Ed Gardner
  2. The Time Machine (30 Nov 48 KFI / 21 Sep 48 NBC) Kay Kyser
  3. Enoch Soames (1 Mar 49 KFI / 7 Dec 48 NBC) Donald Ogden Steward
  4. A Christmas Carol (24 Dec 1949 NBC) Everyone!

 I ask you to imagine, gentlemen, a cube—a square box, let us say—which has only those three dimensions: length, breadth, and thickness. . . . Would not such a cube also require another dimension? 

—The Time Machine




   “A Memory of the
Nineteen-Nineties”
by Teller
First publication: The Atlantic Monthly, Nov 1997

Max Beerbohm, an author in the 1890s and early twentieth century, told a tale of Enoch Soames who made a deal with the devil to visit the Reading Room in the British Museum on 3 June 1997. Famed magician Teller recounts what happened at ten past two on the designated day, a day that Teller has been waiting and planning for for thirty-four and a half years.

 In other words, anyone in the Round Reading Room of the British Museum at ten past two on June 3, 1997, would be able to verify Beerbohm’s memoir, and see an authentic, guaranteed, proven ghost. 


 

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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)