Vsauce!
Kevin here.
The folks behind the new show Timeless asked me to talk about time travel, and coincidentally
I’ve just finished building my time machine.
It’s a little rough around the edges but if I can get it to work I can conquer time.
Why would I want to do that?
Well, exploring different periods in human history allows us to experience firsthand
the aspects of humanity that have changed and the ones that haven't.
But until I get this thing working - time machines are a great device for storytelling
because time travel is something you already do in your mind.
OoooOOoooh.
No really.
Chronesthesia is the ability to remember the past and to imagine the future as a guide
for making decisions in the present.
Hypothesized by experimental psychologist Dr. Endel Tulving as the only memory system
with a special relationship to time, this Mental Time Travel process consists of two
parts.
The first is like watching a movie in your head.
It includes the setting of the event, the actors involved, and what happened.
The second is the subjective time it all takes place whether it’s past, present or future.
Being able to travel through time mentally allows us to learn from past events and project
how to react in the future.
This is especially helpful in social situations - altering behavior based on how things went
in the past, making friends and making enemies.
Human survival has depended on mental time travel by planting seeds for future harvests
as well as formally educating the young to lead communities tomorrow.
Or as Tulving puts it, “The kind of culture that Homo sapiens have created over the past
40,000 years or so can be produced only by individuals whose intelligence includes conscious
awareness of the future in which they and their progeny will continue to live and survive."
The third little pig that built his house out of brick was really good at this.
But mental time is subjective - you can’t exactly tell someone to meet you somewhere
at the time you’re thinking of in your head.
External time-keeping requires some form of measurement.
Like a girl disguised as a lamp by a magic reindeer hiding from the moon.
For most of human existence, the moon was a critical time-keeper.
Folklore of the Chukchi of North-East Siberia told that after successfully eluding its pursuit,
the girl captured the moon and made it promise to stay in the sky and mark time with its
cycles.
The phases of the moon helped guide seasons and months while the position of the sun helped
chart the day.
Sundials processed the sun’s movement by making a clock out of shadows.
Which works well unless it’s cloudy or unless it’s nighttime - which is why we started
stealing water.
Clepsydra comes from the ancient greek kleptein meaning steal and hydor meaning water.
Water clocks kept time by measuring the flow of liquid between vessels.
In Ancient Persia, a bowl with a hole in it was slowly filled after being placed in water;
in Ancient Egypt, a stone vessel consistently dripped into a container with markings that
approximated the hours.
The phrase “don’t muddy the waters” may originate from getting dirt in water clocks
and messing up their timing.
But for thousands of years, most people didn’t know what time it was the way we do today
and they didn’t need to.
Basic circadian rhythm was enough - no one needed to know when it was exactly 7:17pm.
Early clocks served specific purposes.
Water clocks informed priests when to perform daily rituals in Egypt, they were used as
timers during legal trials in Athens, and they managed a farmer’s water usage for
irrigation in Persia.
The impetus to develop mechanical clocks came during the Middle Ages and was largely astronomical
- measuring the movements of the stars.
Not everyone was cuckoo for clocks.
Resistance to breaking down life into tiny, structured bits was documented by Roman playwright
Plautus in 195 BC.
The gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish hours!
Confound them too, Who in this place set up a sundial,
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly Into small portions!
Plautus would’ve hated alarm clocks.
Sundials and water clocks simply split day and night into 12 parts.
Fixed-length hours and minutes were conceived for celestial calculations by Greek Astronomers,
but mechanical clocks featuring them weren’t around until the end of the 16th century.
And public, synchronized clock time wasn’t part of daily life until the 19th century.
An era when the magic of myths met the machinations of science.
The Industrial Revolution brought with it a new world of science, technology, specialized
labor, discovery, and machines.
Suddenly the curiosity of common people was pointed at the possibilities provided by science.
And they wanted to read stories that allowed them to travel to an imagined future of scientific
wonder.
Describing the impact of science on imagination, George Cary Eggleston wrote in 1874, “The
appetite for the marvellous is a universal one, and from the earliest dawn of literature
until now there have always been wonder stories eagerly read of all men.
Ours is a scientific age, however, an age of easy unbelief, a question, doubting, faithless
age, and we do not readily accept, even in the half-hearted, constructive way in which
fiction must be believed to be enjoyed, any thing not borne out by hard-visaged fact.”
A culture in futuristic warp-drive, seeing land conquered by train, water conquered by
steamboat, even hot air balloons had an 1833 newspaper dreaming of, “time in perspective
when our atmosphere will be traversed with as much facility as our water...”
These advancements made time measurement more important.
In 1817, Welsh social reformer Robert Owen campaigned for an eight-hour work day with
the slogan, "Eight hours labour, Eight hours recreation, Eight hours rest."
So if human life is suddenly carved up by a clock, why not invent something that can
conquer time?
Before clocks and machines flooded civilization, time travel tales like Memoirs Of The Twentieth
Century written by Samuel Madden in 1733 imagined life in a different time, but lacked a scientific
vehicle to navigate it.
Today, stories from The Time Machine to Timeless continue to captivate and inspire but the
very first time machine was lost in time.
Seven years before H.G. Wells' legendary book, there was The Clock That Went Backwards.
Written in 1881, it’s the first story that uses a device, in this case a Grandfather
clock, to transport humans through time.
The concept of time machines required a convergence of science, imagination and the sun.
A newspaper called The Sun...not the fireball star.
Edward Page Mitchell was Editor of The Sun, a New York City newspaper with the largest
circulation in the world at the time.
Endlessly creative, Mitchell wrote the first stories involving scientific teleportation,
Artificial Intelligence, faster-than-light travel, freezing and reviving a lifeform,
a peaceful alien, surgically altering personalities, the invisible man and a time machine.
The problem is the one thing his revolutionary stories didn’t include was his name.
All but one of his short stories were printed anonymously at a time when there was no international
copyright law so stories were easily stolen and reprinted.
The only reason anyone knows of Mitchell today is because science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz
spent three years painstakingly poring over microfilm and piecing together his stories
for 1973’s The Crystal Man: Stories by Edward Page Mitchell.
Moskowitz went back in time to save Mitchell for the future, but it didn’t work.
His book is out of print, hard to find, and is also becoming forgotten.
Being forgotten is easy for a person not looking for glory.
In 1916, Mitchell received an offer to leave The Sun for the prestigious New York Times
and declined, content with the publication that allowed him freedom to publish his stories.
When he retired from working in the city that never sleeps, he moved to a secluded farm
in Rhode Island.
His isolated property spanned 40 miles with Mitchell describing it as, “an enclosure
of tree-tops, unbroken by human habitation.”
He not only cast aside modern life, he spurned modern conveniences like electricity, gas
and central heating.
All that was there - was time.
All he brought with him was his wife and his collection of six thousand books.
His love and his imagination.
When Mitchell died following a heart attack in January of 1927, a two-page obituary in
Literary Digest, the leading news magazine of the day, described him as, “hardly known,
even as a name, to the general public.”
Edward Page Mitchell was the invisible man.
Yet the waves of influence that emanate from his creations continue to travel through time
and inspire us today.
Proof alone we have the ability to change the future even if no one knows who we are.
And as always - thanks
for watching.
I want to thank Timeless on NBC for producing this video with me.
To check out the trailer click right here - for more information check out the description
below.
I need to go figure out what happened to my time machine.
So yeah.