50 Fun Facts About The Time Machine

Which sitcom's friends buy a full-size replica of the 1960 film's time machine at an online auction?

The Big Bang Theory had its heroes bid on what they took for a miniature, only for a full-size machine to arrive. Morlocks then haunt Sheldon's dreams.

Which breakfast food played the lava that buries London in the 1960 film The Time Machine?

Oatmeal was cooked days ahead and left over a hot weekend, so it had fermented by the time it flowed across the model streets. The smell on set was foul.

How is Simon Wells, who directed the 2002 film The Time Machine, related to its author H. G. Wells?

Great-grandson Simon Wells came from animation and had never directed live action. He made his pitch to the studio by pointing to his own surname.

What is the only food eaten by the gentle Eloi of the year 802,701 in The Time Machine?

Fruit is all the Eloi eat, because horses, cattle and dogs died out long ago. The Time Traveller has to go without meat for his whole stay.

Which meat does the Time Traveller demand on staggering into his own dinner party from the future?

Mutton is all he asks for, and he refuses to tell his story until he has eaten it. By his own count he has lived eight days since four that afternoon.

Which killer flees to San Francisco in H. G. Wells's time machine in the film Time After Time?

Jack the Ripper is unmasked as one of the friends Wells shows his invention to, and Wells follows him to 1979. Malcolm McDowell plays the novelist.

What does the Time Traveller lay on the table as evidence of his journey, put in his pocket by Weena?

Two white flowers, slipped into his pocket by Weena, belong to no species his guests can identify. The narrator still has them years after the Traveller vanishes.

The Time Traveller decides the underground Morlocks descend from which part of Victorian society?

The working class, already labouring in underground workrooms in Wells's day, is shut below for good in his account. The idle rich above dwindle into the Eloi.

Wells's Time Traveller is nameless in the book; what do his friends call him in the 1960 film?

George is what his friends call him, and a brass plate on the machine spells out H. George Wells. The film's director happened to share the name.

What does Weena dread above everything else, a terror shared by all the Eloi in The Time Machine?

The dark is when the Morlocks climb to the surface to hunt, so the Eloi crowd into their halls every night. None of them ever sleeps alone or outdoors.

What does the Time Traveller accidentally start that costs Weena her life as they flee the Morlocks?

A forest fire grows out of a blaze he lights to cover their retreat through the woods. It scatters the Morlocks, but Weena is lost in it.

From what fate does the Time Traveller save Weena while the other Eloi look on and do nothing?

Drowning nearly takes her when cramp seizes her as she bathes, and not one of her companions moves to help. From then on she follows him everywhere.

Inside the bronze pedestal of which marble statue do the Morlocks hide the stolen Time Machine?

A winged sphinx with a faint smile seems to watch him from the moment he arrives. Wells asked for it to appear on the cover of the first London edition.

What kind of building does the ruined Palace of Green Porcelain turn out to be in The Time Machine?

A museum, it reminds him of London's South Kensington, with fossil skeletons and rusting machinery under thick dust. He searches it for anything useful against the Morlocks.

Which find in an airtight case makes the Time Traveller dance for joy in the far future?

A box of matches hands him the one thing the Morlocks cannot bear, and he celebrates with a whistled tune and an improvised dance. Weena is delighted.

Which parts does the Time Traveller unscrew and pocket so no one in 802,701 can run his machine?

The levers go into his pocket the moment curious Eloi start fingering the machine. So when the Morlocks drag it away, they cannot make it travel.

Which system does the Time Traveller first think has triumphed, seeing no private houses in 802,701?

Communism is the single word he says to himself on noticing that cottages and family homes have vanished. He soon learns the truth is far uglier.

Which monstrous creatures stalk the Time Traveller on a red beach millions of years ahead?

Giant crabs as big as a table wave whip-like antennae at him, and one brushes his cheek from behind. He escapes by jumping a month onward.

The 2002 film The Time Machine moves the inventor's home from near London to which American city?

New York is where Alexander Hartdegen teaches at Columbia University in 1899. The film's Eloi live on cliffs in what used to be Manhattan.

Which other H. G. Wells novel had the maker of the 1960 film The Time Machine already produced?

The War of the Worlds reached cinemas in 1953 with Pal producing and Byron Haskin directing. For the 1960 film he took the director's chair himself.

Which milestone in H. G. Wells's writing career does The Time Machine, published in 1895, represent?

His first novel earned him £100 when it ran as a magazine serial. Its title also gave English a new term for any such device.

What loss drives Alexander Hartdegen to build his machine in the 2002 film The Time Machine?

His fiancée's murder by a mugger sends him back to save her, only for her to die again in a road accident. Wells's own Traveller has no such motive.

In the 2002 film The Time Machine, what is accidentally destroyed in 2037, dooming civilisation?

The Moon breaks apart thanks to the people settling it, and the planet becomes all but uninhabitable. Its fragments still hang in the sky 800,000 years on.

Which Australian actor played the Time Traveller, renamed Alexander Hartdegen, in the 2002 film?

Guy Pearce called the shoot a gruelling test of patience and nerves. He also admitted he was not at all happy with what he did in it.

Which Oscar-winning Englishman plays the telepathic Über-Morlock in the 2002 film The Time Machine?

Jeremy Irons plays a figure Wells never wrote: an intelligent ruler who commands the other Morlocks with his mind. He ages to nothing outside the machine's bubble.

Shots of the world changing at high speed won the 1960 film The Time Machine which Oscar?

Best Special Effects went to Gene Warren and Tim Baar, on a film that cost under $1 million. Wah Chang built the machine itself, a sled with a large spinning disc.

On what kind of seat does the Time Traveller sit to work the controls in H. G. Wells's novel?

A saddle is his word for it, which fits a book Wells himself measured against the bicycle. He wrote that it had lasted as long as the safety bicycle, born about the same date.

In which Surrey town on the Thames does the Time Traveller host his weekly dinners in Wells's novel?

Richmond is where the narrator goes to dine, and the world of the Eloi lies on the very same hillside 800,000 years on. The machine moves through time, not across country.

How does the narrator of The Time Machine identify most guests at the Time Traveller's dinners?

By their jobs: the Medical Man, the Psychologist, the Editor and the Provincial Mayor all go unnamed. The red-haired, argumentative Filby is a rare exception.

Besides length, breadth and thickness, what does the Time Traveller say every real body must have?

Duration is his word for time, which he treats as a fourth dimension just like the three of space. A cube that lasts for no time at all, he argues, cannot exist.

Which Australian took his first leading film role as the hero of the 1960 film The Time Machine?

Rod Taylor was chosen as a younger, more athletic hero who could convincingly fight Morlocks. Three years later he starred in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

Which actress was only 17 when she played Weena in the 1960 film The Time Machine?

Yvette Mimieux was new to films, and her acting improved so much during the shoot that the director went back and reshot some of her early scenes.

What sound sends the Eloi walking in a trance to the Morlocks in the 1960 film The Time Machine?

Air-raid sirens blare from the statue's base, its doors open, and the Eloi file inside without a struggle. The same wail sends Londoners to shelters in the film's 1966 scene.

Which trade did the teenage H. G. Wells learn in an unhappy apprenticeship that later inspired his novel Kipps?

Draper was the trade: Wells worked thirteen-hour days at a Southsea emporium and slept in a dormitory with the other apprentices. He talked his way out of it to become a pupil-teacher.

Which fierce defender of Darwin taught biology to H. G. Wells before he wrote The Time Machine?

T. H. Huxley, nicknamed Darwin's Bulldog, taught him at the Normal School of Science in London. Evolution, and where it might take humanity, drives the whole novel.

Which 1888 story in H. G. Wells's college magazine was the first draft of The Time Machine?

The Chronic Argonauts stars an inventor called Dr Moses Nebogipfel, whose Welsh neighbours suspect him of witchcraft. The finished novel followed seven years later.

Which editor, the poet who wrote Invictus, urged H. G. Wells on and serialised The Time Machine?

W. E. Henley ran it first in the National Observer and then, in 1895, in The New Review. He also pressed Wells to pad the tale out, and Wells cut the additions.

Before the label science fiction caught on, what did H. G. Wells call novels like The Time Machine?

Scientific romances was his label for a six-year burst of novels around the turn of the century. Critics had been using the term since before he was born.

K. W. Jeter, who sent the Morlocks to Victorian London in Morlock Night, coined which genre name?

Steampunk first appeared in a 1987 letter Jeter wrote to Locus magazine, as a label for Victorian fantasies by him and two friends. His Wells sequel dates from 1979.

Who wrote The Time Ships, the centenary sequel to The Time Machine authorised by the Wells estate?

Stephen Baxter pairs the Traveller with a cultured Morlock called Nebogipfel, a name lifted from Wells's earliest version of the story. It won the Philip K. Dick Award.

Which sky event does the Time Traveller watch from a frozen beach at the far end of his journey?

An eclipse sweeps its shadow over the last scraps of life on the planet, and the cold and silence nearly make him faint. He guesses an inner planet is crossing the bloated sun.

What have the Morlocks done to the Time Machine when they set it out as bait for its owner?

Cleaned and oiled it, to his surprise, as if they had been studying how it ran. They never guess he still carries the parts that make it go.

What does the Time Traveller write on the nose of a carved idol in the Palace of Green Porcelain?

His own name goes on the idol on an irresistible impulse. It is a tease, since the novel never once tells the reader what that name is.

What weather batters the Time Traveller in the first moments after his machine lands in 802,701?

A hailstorm soaks him to the skin as he sits on the turf beside his overturned machine. When it clears, the Eloi ask whether he rode down from the sun in the thunder.

What is the Time Traveller wearing on his feet when he limps home to his waiting dinner guests?

Only socks, tattered and blood-stained, cover his feet. He had set out in old indoor shoes and threw them away when a nail came through the sole.

What is the Time Traveller carrying when he leaves on the journey from which he never returns?

A camera and knapsack show he means to bring back photographs and specimens this time. Among the Morlocks he had cursed himself for not packing a Kodak.

The model Time Machine that vanishes at the first dinner is scarcely bigger than which object?

A small clock is the narrator's measure for the glittering model of metal and ivory. The Traveller says it took two years to make, then guides a guest's finger to send it off for ever.

Who seems to shoot across the laboratory like a rocket as the Time Traveller first sets off?

Mrs. Watchett crosses the room in what feels like a second because he is already moving through time. On the way home he sees her do it again, backwards.

Which star of the 1960 film The Time Machine returned for a shopkeeper cameo in the 2002 remake?

Alan Young played the hero's loyal friend in 1960, then starred in the TV comedy Mister Ed. He also voiced Scrooge McDuck for more than 40 years.

The Time Machine is an early example of which subgenre that takes its name from a Jack Vance book?

Dying Earth stories are set as the planet or its sun runs down, like the novel's final beach scene. Vance's story collection of that title later named the subgenre.