October 21, 2025 • 14 mins
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter three. I told some of you last Thursday of
the principles of the time machine, and showed you the
actual thing itself incomplete in the workshop. There. It is
now a little travel worn, truly, and one of the
ivory bars is cracked and a brass rail bent, but
the rest of it sound enough. I expected to finish
(00:22):
it on Friday. But on Friday, when the pudding together
was nearly done, I found that one of the nickel
bars was exactly one inch too short, and this I
had to get remade, so that the thing was not
complete until this morning. It was at ten o'clock to
day that the first of all time machines began its career.
(00:44):
I gave it at last tap, tried all the screws again,
put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod,
and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide
who holds a pistol to his skull, feels much the
same wonder at what will come next as I felt.
Then I took the starting lever in one hand and
(01:04):
the stopping one in the other. Pressed the first, and
almost immediately the second I seemed to reel. I felt
a nightmare sensation of falling, and looking around, I saw
the laboratory exactly as before. Had anything happened. For a
moment I suspected that my intellect had tricked me. Then
(01:26):
I noted the clock a moment before, as it seemed
it had stood at a minute or so past ten.
Now it was nearly half past three. I drew a breath,
set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands,
and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy
(01:48):
and went dark. Missus Watchett came in and walked, apparently
without seeing me, towards the garden door. I suppose it
took her a minute or so to traverse the place,
but to me, she seemed to shoot across the room
like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its
extreme position. The night came like the turning out of
(02:08):
a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory
grew faint and hazy, then fainter and even fainter. Tomorrow
night came black, then day again, night again, day again,
faster and faster still, and Eddie murmur filled my ears,
and a strange, dumb, confusedness descended on my mind. I
(02:33):
am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time traveling.
They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like
that one has upon a switchback of a helpless headlong motion.
I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent
smash as I put on pace. Night followed day, like
(02:57):
the flapping of a black wing. The day suggestion of
the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and
I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping
it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I
suppose the laboratory had been destroyed, and I had come
into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding,
(03:21):
but I was already going too fast to be conscious
of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled
dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling succession of
darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then,
in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly
(03:41):
through her quarters from new to full, and had a
faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on,
still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged
into one continuous grayness. The sky took on a wonderful
deepness of blue, a splendid, luminous color like that of
(04:02):
early twilight. The jerking sun became a streak of fire,
a brilliant arch in space, the moon a fainter, fluctuating band,
and I could see nothing of the stars save now
and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue. The
landscape was misty and vague. I was still on the
(04:25):
hillside upon which this house now stands, and the shoulder
rose above me, gray and dim. I saw trees growing
and changing, like puffs of vapor, now brown, now green.
They grew, spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge
buildings rise up, faint and fair, and pass like dreams.
(04:49):
The whole surface of the earth seemed changed, melting and
flowing under my eyes. The little hands upon the dials
that registered my speed raced round faster and faster. Presently
I noted that the sun belt swayed up and down
from soulstice to solstice in a minute or less, and
(05:10):
that consequently my pace was over a year a minute,
and minute by minute, the white snow flashed across the
world and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief
green of spring. The unpleasant sensations of the start were
less poignant now. They merged at last into a kind
of hysterical exhilaration. I remarked, indeed, a clumsy swaying of
(05:36):
the machine for which I was unable to account, But
my mind was too confused to attend to it. So,
with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung
myself into futurity. At first I scarce thought of stopping,
scarce thought of anything but these new sensations. But presently
(05:58):
a fresh series of impressions grew up in my mind,
a certain curiosity, and therewith a certain dread, until at
last they took complete possession of me. What strange developments
of humanity, What wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilization, I
thought might not appear. When I came to look nearly
(06:20):
into the dim elusive world that raced and fluctuated before
my eyes, I saw great and splendid architecture rising about me,
more massive than any buildings of our own time, And
yet it seemed built of glimmer and mist. I saw
a richer green flow up the hillside and remain there
(06:42):
without any wintry intermission. Even through the veil of my confusion,
the earth seemed very fair, and so my mind came
round to the business of stopping. The peculiar risk lay
in the possibility of my finding some substance in the
space which I or the machine occupied. So long as
(07:04):
I traveled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered.
I was, so to speak, attenuated, was slipping like a
vapor through the interstices of intervening substances. But to come
to a stop involve the jamming of myself, molecule by
molecule into whatever lay in my way. Meant bringing my
(07:26):
atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle,
that a profound chemical reaction, possibly a far reaching explosion,
would result and blow myself and my apparatus out of
all possible dimensions into the unknown. This possibility had occurred
to me again and again while I was making the machine,
(07:48):
But then I had cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable risk,
one of the risks a man has got to take.
Now the risk was inevitable. I no longer saw in
the same cheerful light. The fact is that insensibly, the
absolute strangeness of everything, the sickly jarring and swaying of
(08:09):
the machine, above all, the feeling of prolonged falling, had
absolutely upset my nerve. I told myself that I could
never stop, and with a gust of petulance, I resolved
to stop forthwith, like an impatient fool, I lugged over
the lever, and incontinently, the thing went wreathing over, and
(08:31):
I was flung headlong through the air. There was the
sound of a clap of thunder in my ears. I
may have been stunned for a moment. A pitiless hail
was hissing round me, and I was sitting on a
soft turf in front of the overset machine. Everything still
seemed gray, but presently I remarked that the confusion in
(08:52):
my ears was gone. I looked round me. I was
on what seemed to be a little lawn in a garden,
surrounded by rhododendron bushes, and I noticed that their mauve
and purple blossoms were dropping in a shower under the
beating of the hailstones. The rebounding dancing hail hung in
(09:13):
a cloud over the machine and drove along the ground
like smoke. In a moment, I was wet to the skin.
Fine hospitality, said I to a man who has traveled
innumerable years to see you. Presently, I thought what a
fool I was to get wet. I stood up and
(09:33):
looked round me. A colossal figure, carved apparently in some
white stone, loomed indistinctly beyond the rhododendrons through the hazy downpour.
But all else of the world was invisible. My sensations
would be hard to describe. As the columns of hail
grew thinner, I saw the white figure more distinctly. It
(09:57):
was very large for a silver birch tree. Its shoulder
it was of a white marble in shape, something like
a winged sphinx, but the wings, instead of being carried
vertically at the sides, were spread so that it seemed
to hover. The pedestal, it appeared to me, was of
bronze and was thick with verdigris. It chanced that the
(10:21):
face was towards me. The sightless eyes seemed to watch me.
There was the faint shadow of a smile on the lips.
It was greatly weather worn, and that imparted an unpleasant
suggestion of disease. I stood looking at it for a
little space, half a minute, perhaps, or half an hour.
(10:43):
It seemed to advance and to recede, as the hail
drove before it, denser or thinner. At last, I tore
my eyes from it for a moment, and saw that
the hail curtain had worn threadbare, and that the sky
was lightning with the promise of the sun. I looked
up again at the crouching white shape, and the full
(11:04):
temerity of my voyage came suddenly upon me. What might
appear when that hazy curtain was altogether withdrawn? What might
not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown
into a common passion? What if in this interval the
race had lost its manliness and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic,
(11:27):
and overwhelmingly powerful. I might seem some old world savage animal,
only the more dreadful and disgusting for our common likeness,
a foul creature to be incontinently slain. Already I saw
other vast shapes, huge buildings with intricate parapets, and tall columns,
(11:50):
with a wooded hillside dimly creeping in upon me through
the lessening storm. I was seized with a panic fear.
I turned frantically to the time machine and strove hard
to readjust it. As I did so, the shafts of
the sun smote through the thunder storm. The gray downpour
was swept aside and vanished, like the trailing garments of
(12:13):
a ghost. Above me, in the intense blue of the
summer sky, some faint brown shreds of cloud whirled into nothingness.
The great buildings about me stood out clear and distinct,
shining with the wet of the thunder storm, and picked
out in white by the unmelted hailstones piled along their courses.
(12:35):
I felt naked in a strange world. I felt as
perhaps a bird may feel in the clear air, knowing
the hawk wings above and will swoop. My fear grew
to frenzy. I took a breathing space, set my teeth,
and again grappling fiercely wrist and knee with the machine.
(12:56):
It gave under my desperate onset and turned over. It
struck my chin violently, one hand on the saddle, the
other on the lever. I stood, panting heavily in attitude
to mount again, but with this recovery of a prompt retreat,
my courage recovered. I looked more curiously and less fearfully
(13:17):
at this world of the remote future. In a circular
opening high up in the wall of the nearer house,
I saw a group of figures clad in rich soft robes.
They had seen me, and their faces were directed towards me.
Then I heard voices approaching me. Coming through the bushes.
By the white sphinx were the heads and shoulders of
(13:39):
men running. One of these emerged in a pathway leading
straight to the little lawn upon which I stood with
my machine. He was a slight creature, perhaps four feet high,
clad in a purple tunic, girdled at the waist with
a leather belt. Sandals or buskins I could not clearly
(13:59):
distinguished which were on his feet. His legs were bare
to the knees, and his head was bare. Noticing that
I noticed for the first time how warm the air was.
He struck me as being a very beautiful and graceful creature,
but indescribably frail. His flushed face reminded me of the
(14:21):
more beautiful kind of consumptive, that hectic beauty of which
we used to hear so much. At this sight of him,
I suddenly regained confidence. I took my hands from the machine.
End of Chapter three
Chapter three. I told some of you last Thursday of
the principles of the time machine, and showed you the
actual thing itself incomplete in the workshop. There. It is
now a little travel worn, truly, and one of the
ivory bars is cracked and a brass rail bent, but
the rest of it sound enough. I expected to finish
(00:22):
it on Friday. But on Friday, when the pudding together
was nearly done, I found that one of the nickel
bars was exactly one inch too short, and this I
had to get remade, so that the thing was not
complete until this morning. It was at ten o'clock to
day that the first of all time machines began its career.
(00:44):
I gave it at last tap, tried all the screws again,
put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod,
and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide
who holds a pistol to his skull, feels much the
same wonder at what will come next as I felt.
Then I took the starting lever in one hand and
(01:04):
the stopping one in the other. Pressed the first, and
almost immediately the second I seemed to reel. I felt
a nightmare sensation of falling, and looking around, I saw
the laboratory exactly as before. Had anything happened. For a
moment I suspected that my intellect had tricked me. Then
(01:26):
I noted the clock a moment before, as it seemed
it had stood at a minute or so past ten.
Now it was nearly half past three. I drew a breath,
set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands,
and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy
(01:48):
and went dark. Missus Watchett came in and walked, apparently
without seeing me, towards the garden door. I suppose it
took her a minute or so to traverse the place,
but to me, she seemed to shoot across the room
like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its
extreme position. The night came like the turning out of
(02:08):
a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory
grew faint and hazy, then fainter and even fainter. Tomorrow
night came black, then day again, night again, day again,
faster and faster still, and Eddie murmur filled my ears,
and a strange, dumb, confusedness descended on my mind. I
(02:33):
am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time traveling.
They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like
that one has upon a switchback of a helpless headlong motion.
I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent
smash as I put on pace. Night followed day, like
(02:57):
the flapping of a black wing. The day suggestion of
the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and
I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping
it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I
suppose the laboratory had been destroyed, and I had come
into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding,
(03:21):
but I was already going too fast to be conscious
of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled
dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling succession of
darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then,
in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly
(03:41):
through her quarters from new to full, and had a
faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on,
still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged
into one continuous grayness. The sky took on a wonderful
deepness of blue, a splendid, luminous color like that of
(04:02):
early twilight. The jerking sun became a streak of fire,
a brilliant arch in space, the moon a fainter, fluctuating band,
and I could see nothing of the stars save now
and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue. The
landscape was misty and vague. I was still on the
(04:25):
hillside upon which this house now stands, and the shoulder
rose above me, gray and dim. I saw trees growing
and changing, like puffs of vapor, now brown, now green.
They grew, spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge
buildings rise up, faint and fair, and pass like dreams.
(04:49):
The whole surface of the earth seemed changed, melting and
flowing under my eyes. The little hands upon the dials
that registered my speed raced round faster and faster. Presently
I noted that the sun belt swayed up and down
from soulstice to solstice in a minute or less, and
(05:10):
that consequently my pace was over a year a minute,
and minute by minute, the white snow flashed across the
world and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief
green of spring. The unpleasant sensations of the start were
less poignant now. They merged at last into a kind
of hysterical exhilaration. I remarked, indeed, a clumsy swaying of
(05:36):
the machine for which I was unable to account, But
my mind was too confused to attend to it. So,
with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung
myself into futurity. At first I scarce thought of stopping,
scarce thought of anything but these new sensations. But presently
(05:58):
a fresh series of impressions grew up in my mind,
a certain curiosity, and therewith a certain dread, until at
last they took complete possession of me. What strange developments
of humanity, What wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilization, I
thought might not appear. When I came to look nearly
(06:20):
into the dim elusive world that raced and fluctuated before
my eyes, I saw great and splendid architecture rising about me,
more massive than any buildings of our own time, And
yet it seemed built of glimmer and mist. I saw
a richer green flow up the hillside and remain there
(06:42):
without any wintry intermission. Even through the veil of my confusion,
the earth seemed very fair, and so my mind came
round to the business of stopping. The peculiar risk lay
in the possibility of my finding some substance in the
space which I or the machine occupied. So long as
(07:04):
I traveled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered.
I was, so to speak, attenuated, was slipping like a
vapor through the interstices of intervening substances. But to come
to a stop involve the jamming of myself, molecule by
molecule into whatever lay in my way. Meant bringing my
(07:26):
atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle,
that a profound chemical reaction, possibly a far reaching explosion,
would result and blow myself and my apparatus out of
all possible dimensions into the unknown. This possibility had occurred
to me again and again while I was making the machine,
(07:48):
But then I had cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable risk,
one of the risks a man has got to take.
Now the risk was inevitable. I no longer saw in
the same cheerful light. The fact is that insensibly, the
absolute strangeness of everything, the sickly jarring and swaying of
(08:09):
the machine, above all, the feeling of prolonged falling, had
absolutely upset my nerve. I told myself that I could
never stop, and with a gust of petulance, I resolved
to stop forthwith, like an impatient fool, I lugged over
the lever, and incontinently, the thing went wreathing over, and
(08:31):
I was flung headlong through the air. There was the
sound of a clap of thunder in my ears. I
may have been stunned for a moment. A pitiless hail
was hissing round me, and I was sitting on a
soft turf in front of the overset machine. Everything still
seemed gray, but presently I remarked that the confusion in
(08:52):
my ears was gone. I looked round me. I was
on what seemed to be a little lawn in a garden,
surrounded by rhododendron bushes, and I noticed that their mauve
and purple blossoms were dropping in a shower under the
beating of the hailstones. The rebounding dancing hail hung in
(09:13):
a cloud over the machine and drove along the ground
like smoke. In a moment, I was wet to the skin.
Fine hospitality, said I to a man who has traveled
innumerable years to see you. Presently, I thought what a
fool I was to get wet. I stood up and
(09:33):
looked round me. A colossal figure, carved apparently in some
white stone, loomed indistinctly beyond the rhododendrons through the hazy downpour.
But all else of the world was invisible. My sensations
would be hard to describe. As the columns of hail
grew thinner, I saw the white figure more distinctly. It
(09:57):
was very large for a silver birch tree. Its shoulder
it was of a white marble in shape, something like
a winged sphinx, but the wings, instead of being carried
vertically at the sides, were spread so that it seemed
to hover. The pedestal, it appeared to me, was of
bronze and was thick with verdigris. It chanced that the
(10:21):
face was towards me. The sightless eyes seemed to watch me.
There was the faint shadow of a smile on the lips.
It was greatly weather worn, and that imparted an unpleasant
suggestion of disease. I stood looking at it for a
little space, half a minute, perhaps, or half an hour.
(10:43):
It seemed to advance and to recede, as the hail
drove before it, denser or thinner. At last, I tore
my eyes from it for a moment, and saw that
the hail curtain had worn threadbare, and that the sky
was lightning with the promise of the sun. I looked
up again at the crouching white shape, and the full
(11:04):
temerity of my voyage came suddenly upon me. What might
appear when that hazy curtain was altogether withdrawn? What might
not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown
into a common passion? What if in this interval the
race had lost its manliness and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic,
(11:27):
and overwhelmingly powerful. I might seem some old world savage animal,
only the more dreadful and disgusting for our common likeness,
a foul creature to be incontinently slain. Already I saw
other vast shapes, huge buildings with intricate parapets, and tall columns,
(11:50):
with a wooded hillside dimly creeping in upon me through
the lessening storm. I was seized with a panic fear.
I turned frantically to the time machine and strove hard
to readjust it. As I did so, the shafts of
the sun smote through the thunder storm. The gray downpour
was swept aside and vanished, like the trailing garments of
(12:13):
a ghost. Above me, in the intense blue of the
summer sky, some faint brown shreds of cloud whirled into nothingness.
The great buildings about me stood out clear and distinct,
shining with the wet of the thunder storm, and picked
out in white by the unmelted hailstones piled along their courses.
(12:35):
I felt naked in a strange world. I felt as
perhaps a bird may feel in the clear air, knowing
the hawk wings above and will swoop. My fear grew
to frenzy. I took a breathing space, set my teeth,
and again grappling fiercely wrist and knee with the machine.
(12:56):
It gave under my desperate onset and turned over. It
struck my chin violently, one hand on the saddle, the
other on the lever. I stood, panting heavily in attitude
to mount again, but with this recovery of a prompt retreat,
my courage recovered. I looked more curiously and less fearfully
(13:17):
at this world of the remote future. In a circular
opening high up in the wall of the nearer house,
I saw a group of figures clad in rich soft robes.
They had seen me, and their faces were directed towards me.
Then I heard voices approaching me. Coming through the bushes.
By the white sphinx were the heads and shoulders of
(13:39):
men running. One of these emerged in a pathway leading
straight to the little lawn upon which I stood with
my machine. He was a slight creature, perhaps four feet high,
clad in a purple tunic, girdled at the waist with
a leather belt. Sandals or buskins I could not clearly
(13:59):
distinguished which were on his feet. His legs were bare
to the knees, and his head was bare. Noticing that
I noticed for the first time how warm the air was.
He struck me as being a very beautiful and graceful creature,
but indescribably frail. His flushed face reminded me of the
(14:21):
more beautiful kind of consumptive, that hectic beauty of which
we used to hear so much. At this sight of him,
I suddenly regained confidence. I took my hands from the machine.
End of Chapter three
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