Victorian times mathematicians were routinely combining space and time into a single entity. They didn’t (yet) call it spacetime, but they could see that it had four dimensions: three of space plus one of time. Journalists and the lay public soon began to refer to time as the fourth dimension, because they couldn’t think of another one, and to talk as if scientists had been looking for it for ages and had just found it. Newcomb wrote about the science of four-dimensional space from 1877, and spoke about it to the New York Mathematical Society in 1893.
Wells’s mention of Newcomb suggests a link to one of the more colourful members of Victorian society, the writer Charles Howard Hinton. Hinton’s primary claim to fame is his enthusiastic promotion of ‘the’ fourth dimension. He was a talented mathematician with a genuine flair for four-dimensional geometry, and in 1880 he published ‘What is the Fourth Dimension?’ in the Dublin University Magazine , which was reprinted in the Cheltenham Ladies’ Gazette ayear later. In 1884 it reappeared as a pamphlet with the subtitle ‘Ghosts Explained’. Hinton, something of a mystic, related the fourth dimension to pseudoscientific topics ranging from ghosts to the afterlife. A ghost can easily appear from, and disappear along, a fourth dimension, for instance, just as a coin can appear on, and disappear from, a tabletop, by moving along ‘the’ third dimension.
Charles Hinton was influenced by the unorthodox views of his surgeon father James, a collaborator of Havelock Ellis, who outraged Victorian society with his studies of human sexual behaviour. Hinton the elder advocated free love and polygamy, and eventually headed a cult. Hinton the younger also had an eventful private life: in 1886 he fled to Japan, having been convicted of bigamy at the Old Bailey. In 1893 he left Japan to become a mathematics instructor at Princeton University, where he invented a baseball-pitching machine that used gunpowder to propel the balls, like a cannon. After several accidents the device was abandoned and Hinton lost his job, but his continuing efforts to promote the fourth dimension were more successful. He wrote about it in popular magazines like Harper’s Weekly, McClure’s , and Science . He died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1907, at the annual dinner of the Society of Philanthropic Enquiry, having just completed a toast to female philosophers.
It was probably Hinton who put Wells on to the narrative possibilities of time as the fourth dimension. The evidence is indirect but compelling. Newcomb definitely knew Hinton: he once got Hinton a job. We don’t know whether Wells ever met Hinton, but there is circumstantial evidence of a close connection. For example, the term ‘scientific romance’ was coined by Hinton in titles of his collected speculative essays in 1884 and 1886, and Wells later used the same phrase to describe his own stories. Moreover, Wells was a regular reader of Nature , which reviewed Hinton’s first series of Scientific Romances (favourably) in 1885 and summarised some of his ideas on the fourth dimension.
In all likelihood, Hinton was also partially responsible for anotherVictorian transdimensional saga, Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland of 1884. The tale is about A. Square, who lives in the Euclidean plane, a two-dimensional society of triangles, hexagons and circles, and doesn’t believe in the third dimension until a passing sphere drops him in it. By analogy, Victorians who didn’t believe in the fourth dimension were equally blinkered. A subtext is a satire on Victorian treatment of women and the poor. Many of Abbott’s ingredients closely resemble elements found in Hinton’s stories. 7
Most of the physics of time travel is general relativity, with a dash of quantum mechanics. As far as the wizards of Unseen University are concerned, all this stuff is ‘quantum’ – a universal intellectual get-out-of-jail card – so you can use it to
Wells’s mention of Newcomb suggests a link to one of the more colourful members of Victorian society, the writer Charles Howard Hinton. Hinton’s primary claim to fame is his enthusiastic promotion of ‘the’ fourth dimension. He was a talented mathematician with a genuine flair for four-dimensional geometry, and in 1880 he published ‘What is the Fourth Dimension?’ in the Dublin University Magazine , which was reprinted in the Cheltenham Ladies’ Gazette ayear later. In 1884 it reappeared as a pamphlet with the subtitle ‘Ghosts Explained’. Hinton, something of a mystic, related the fourth dimension to pseudoscientific topics ranging from ghosts to the afterlife. A ghost can easily appear from, and disappear along, a fourth dimension, for instance, just as a coin can appear on, and disappear from, a tabletop, by moving along ‘the’ third dimension.
Charles Hinton was influenced by the unorthodox views of his surgeon father James, a collaborator of Havelock Ellis, who outraged Victorian society with his studies of human sexual behaviour. Hinton the elder advocated free love and polygamy, and eventually headed a cult. Hinton the younger also had an eventful private life: in 1886 he fled to Japan, having been convicted of bigamy at the Old Bailey. In 1893 he left Japan to become a mathematics instructor at Princeton University, where he invented a baseball-pitching machine that used gunpowder to propel the balls, like a cannon. After several accidents the device was abandoned and Hinton lost his job, but his continuing efforts to promote the fourth dimension were more successful. He wrote about it in popular magazines like Harper’s Weekly, McClure’s , and Science . He died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1907, at the annual dinner of the Society of Philanthropic Enquiry, having just completed a toast to female philosophers.
It was probably Hinton who put Wells on to the narrative possibilities of time as the fourth dimension. The evidence is indirect but compelling. Newcomb definitely knew Hinton: he once got Hinton a job. We don’t know whether Wells ever met Hinton, but there is circumstantial evidence of a close connection. For example, the term ‘scientific romance’ was coined by Hinton in titles of his collected speculative essays in 1884 and 1886, and Wells later used the same phrase to describe his own stories. Moreover, Wells was a regular reader of Nature , which reviewed Hinton’s first series of Scientific Romances (favourably) in 1885 and summarised some of his ideas on the fourth dimension.
In all likelihood, Hinton was also partially responsible for anotherVictorian transdimensional saga, Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland of 1884. The tale is about A. Square, who lives in the Euclidean plane, a two-dimensional society of triangles, hexagons and circles, and doesn’t believe in the third dimension until a passing sphere drops him in it. By analogy, Victorians who didn’t believe in the fourth dimension were equally blinkered. A subtext is a satire on Victorian treatment of women and the poor. Many of Abbott’s ingredients closely resemble elements found in Hinton’s stories. 7
Most of the physics of time travel is general relativity, with a dash of quantum mechanics. As far as the wizards of Unseen University are concerned, all this stuff is ‘quantum’ – a universal intellectual get-out-of-jail card – so you can use it to
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