4th Estate
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First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016
First published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2016
Text © James Gleick 2016
James Gleick asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company for permission to reprint excerpts from “Burnt Norton” and “The Dry Salvages” from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, renewed 1964 by T. S. Eliot, and renewed 1969 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Grateful acknowledgment is also made to Faber & Faber Ltd for permission to reprint excerpts from “Burnt Norton” and “The Dry Salvages” from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot. © The Estate of T.S. Eliot. Reproduced by kind permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.
Cover photograph © Bob Mawby/Shutterstock
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008207670
Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780007544448
Version: 2017-08-25
To Beth, Donen, and Harry
Your now is not my now; and again, your then is not my then; but my now may be your then, and vice versa. Whose head is competent to these things?
—Charles Lamb (1817)
The fact that we occupy an ever larger place in Time is something that everybody feels.
—Marcel Proust (1927?)
And tomorrow
Comes. It’s a world. It’s a way.
—W. H. Auden (1936)
Being young, I was skeptical of the future, and saw it as a matter of potential only, a state of things that might or might not arise and probably never would.
—John Banville (2012)
A MAN STANDS AT the end of a drafty corridor, a.k.a. the nineteenth century, and in the flickering light of an oil lamp examines a machine made of nickel and ivory, with brass rails and quartz rods—a squat, ugly contraption, somehow out of focus, not easy for the poor reader to visualize, despite the listing of parts and materials. Our hero fiddles with some screws, adds a drop of oil, and plants himself on the saddle. He grasps a lever with both hands. He is going on a journey. And by the way so are we. When he throws that lever, time breaks from its moorings.
The man is nondescript, almost devoid of features—“grey eyes” and a “pale face” and not much else. He lacks even a name. He is just the Time Traveller: “for so it will be convenient to speak of him.” Time and travel: no one had thought to join those words before now. And that machine? With its saddle and bars, it’s a fantasticated bicycle. The whole thing is the invention of a young enthusiast named Wells, who goes by his initials, H. G., because he thinks that sounds more serious than Herbert. His family calls him Bertie. He is trying to be a writer. He is a thoroughly modern man, a believer in socialism, free love, and bicycles.>fn1 A proud member of the Cyclists’ Touring Club, he rides up and down the Thames valley on a forty-pounder with tubular frame and pneumatic tires, savoring the thrill of riding his machine: “A memory of motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they seem to go.” At some point he sees a printed advertisement for a contraption called Hacker’s Home Bicycle: a stationary stand with rubber wheels to let a person pedal for exercise without going anywhere. Anywhere through space, that is. The wheels go round and time goes by.
The turn of the twentieth century loomed—a calendar date with apocalyptic resonance. Albert Einstein was a boy at gymnasium in Munich. Not till 1908 would the Polish-German mathematician Hermann Minkowski announce his radical idea: “Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.” H. G. Wells was there first, but unlike Minkowski, Wells was not trying to explain the universe. He was just trying to gin up a plausible-sounding plot device for a piece of fantastic storytelling.