What are the origins of time travel stories?

The concept of time travel has evolved significantly over millennia. It began as a supernatural phenomenon in ancient mythology and slowly transformed into the technological science fiction staple we know today.

Here is the chronological evolution of time travel stories.

1. Ancient Mythology: The “Time Slip”

Long before time machines were imagined, ancient cultures understood the concept of “time dilation”—the idea that time flows differently for gods than for mortals. In these early stories, travel was almost always accidental, one-way, and forward into the future.

• The Mahabharata (c. 400 BCE): Often cited as one of the earliest examples. King Raivata Kakudmi travels to heaven to meet the creator god Brahma. He waits for a brief musical performance to finish, only to return to Earth and discover that 108 yugas (eras)—thousands of human years—have passed.
• Urashima Tarō (Japanese Folklore, c. 8th Century): A fisherman saves a turtle and is taken to the Dragon Palace under the sea. He spends three days there, but when he returns to the surface, 300 years have passed, his village is gone, and he is a forgotten man.
• The Seven Sleepers (Christian & Islamic Tradition): A group of youths hide in a cave to escape persecution and fall asleep. They wake up centuries later to find their oppressors long dead and the world changed.

2. The Enlightenment & 19th Century: Sleepers and Dreamers

As literature moved toward the modern era, time travel became a tool for social satire. The method of travel, however, was still passive—usually a deep sleep or a dream.

• Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733): Written by Samuel Madden, this is a rare early example of information traveling backwards. The protagonist receives letters from a guardian angel written in the years 1997 and 1998.
• Rip Van Winkle (1819): Washington Irving’s famous story of a man who drinks a magical liquor and sleeps through the American Revolution, waking up 20 years later.
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889): Mark Twain popularized the “fish out of water” trope. His protagonist, Hank Morgan, doesn’t use a machine but receives a blow to the head that sends him back to AD 528. He uses his 19th-century knowledge to impress the locals with “magic” (science).

3. The First Machines: The Technological Shift

Toward the end of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution influenced writers to replace magic and sleep with mechanics.

• The Clock That Went Backward (1881): A short story by Edward Page Mitchell. This is a crucial “missing link” in the genre. It features a grandfather clock that transports two cousins back to 16th-century Holland. It is often cited as the first story to use a mechanical device to travel backwards in time.
• El Anacronópete (1887): Written by Spanish diplomat Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau, this is widely considered the first novel to feature a designated time machine. The machine (the “Anacronópete”) was a massive, cast-iron box driven by electricity that flew through the atmosphere against the rotation of the Earth.

4. The Game Changer: H.G. Wells

While he wasn’t technically the “first” to write about a machine, H.G. Wells codified the genre and established the rules we use today.

• The Time Machine (1895): Wells introduced the idea of a vehicle that allowed the operator to control their destination—moving forwards or backwards at will. He removed the magic and replaced it with (pseudo)science, treating time as a “fourth dimension” that could be traversed just like space.
  • Why it won: Unlike El Anacronópete, which was satirical and largely forgotten, Wells’ work was a gritty, philosophical look at the future of human evolution (the Eloi and Morlocks). It captured the public imagination and set the template for all time travel stories to follow.

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