The Time Machine

The time machine contains two levers—one to move the machine forward in time, and one to send it backward. Without the levers, the machine cannot work. The Time Traveller always keeps these levers with him, attaching them to the machine only when he means to travel through time, so that the machine cannot be driven by anyone else into a different era and lost to him. The levers represent the power of technology, a power that, unless shepherded carefully, can be misused, or lost altogether.

Matches are the only useful objects, outside of the time machine itself, brought on the adventure by the Traveller—who, in his enthusiasm to visit the future, overlooks things he might need for such a trip. He uses them to light his way in the darkness of the Morlock tunnel world and to deter the creatures when they threaten. At first, he spends the matches thoughtlessly, then manages to replenish them from an ancient supply he finds on display in an abandoned museum. These, and some camphor, he uses to create a brush fire that prevents the Morlocks from catching and killing him. The matches, and his use of them, help demonstrate both the Traveller’s foolish neglect of needed resources and his growing resourcefulness during crises.

The Palace of Green Porcelain—gigantic, pinnacled, and clad in an advanced material that suggests a pastel ceramic—is the largest building the Time Traveller sees during his visit to the distant future. It stands on a hill, miles from his starting place. With Weena, he treks to it and finds within the crumbling remains of exhibits—technology, books, weaponry, natural history—that no longer interest the intellectually feeble Eloi or their counterparts the Morlocks. The building’s enormous size, along with its contents, represent the virtues of a once-great civilization that now decays, untended, on the hillsides where live the debased, effete remains of humanity.

The time machine is the Time Traveller’s invention. It is a framework with a saddle on which he sits, pushing levers that move the device forward or backward in time. “Parts were of nickel, parts of ivory, parts had certainly been filed or sawn out of rock crystal” (11). The Traveller first built a miniature scale model of the machine, and it performed perfectly, disappearing into time at the touch of a tiny lever. The big machine also works as designed, taking him 802,701 years into the future.

Shortly after he arrives at that distant year, the time machine disappears, and his main goal thereafter is to find the device so that he can return to his own time and not be stranded forever in the far future. This quest brings him face to face with the Morlocks, who recognize in him a chief adversary. They try to use the machine as bait in a trap, but the Traveller outwits them, as he knows the machine’s true purpose and can use its power to escape the snare.

The time machine—its name now a cultural commonplace among those who discuss the possibilities of time travel—itself represents a cultural culmination of sorts. In the story, it is a supreme achievement of 19th-century science and engineering and a tribute to the diligent determination of its inventor. It is also the device that drives the plot: Its powers enable the story to traverse the millennia of human evolution, and, when it goes missing, it inspires the plot’s conflict between the protagonist and his adversaries the Morlocks.