The Time Traveller

Moses Nebogipfel,  known to most by his moniker **The Time Traveller**, was the first person in Earth's history to successfully invent and utilize a method of time travel.

## Life

### Early Experiences with Time Travel

In 1885, Nebogipfel, then a young British man studying the sciences in Scotland, had a life-changing encounter. He met an enigmatic man known only as "The Doctor" and his companion, an English-American student named Perpugilliam "Peri" Brown, who claimed to be able to travel through time and space in a strange blue box marked “POLICE.” However, their meeting was under dire circumstances, and Nebogipfel found himself hundreds of thousands of years in the future, battling a monstrous alien dictator called the Borad alongside The Doctor and Brown on the planet Karfel. The experience was terrifying, but he also witnessed some of the wonders of the universe and the future, and after returning to his own time and planet, he was inspired him to seek out his own method for physically traveling through time.

He first built and tested a prototype called the Chronic Argo in 1888 while residing in a small Welsh town called Llyddwdd. However, superstitious townsfolk accused him of witchcraft and ran him out of town, and he moved to Surrey, where he believed the people to be more science-minded, to improve upon his invention.  He successfully concluded work on the time machine in 1891 and first traveled forward to the year 802,701 CE, where he encountered the Eloi - a peaceful, childlike, herbivorous people from a species that evolved from *homo sapiens*. More disturbing were his experiences with their evolutionary siblings the Morlocks - apelike and vicious cave-dwellers. The experience left Nebogipfel disoriented and devastated, especially when, while attempting to escape certain death from the Morlocks, he flung himself millions of years into the future. There, he witnessed the gradual halting of the Earth's rotation, the transformation of the sun into a white dwarf, and the death of the last lifeform left.

Shaken from his first experience with his Time Machine, he returned to 1891 and related his story to a collection of colleagues. This included H.G. Wells, who had by then become a close friend of Nebogipfel, largely based on their mutual interest in the possibilities of what modern and future science can achieve. Wells transcribed the account and published it after waiting three years for his friend to return.  He honored his friend's request by excluding his name from the book and referring to him only by the title of "The Time Traveller" - possibly in tribute to the person who inspired him to create the machine in the first place.

### The Shape of Things to Come

At some point the Traveller returned to Surrey in the first years of the 1930s and tracked down his old friend, now an established historian and popular author. He revealed to Wells that he attempted to return to 802,701 CE, albeit at an earlier point than the date at which he previously arrived, in order to save an Eloi to whom he had developed a strong attraction. To his shock, he discovered that with each trip he took, the future was slightly or even drastically different. He felt that it may be due to what we would now call the uncertainty principle, speculating that the mere act of observation changes the outcome of the experiment, or in this case history. He also acknowledged that it could be an effect of time travel on the traveller, and that it could be something else entirely that he could not comprehend. After all, he was the only person on Earth who could study time travel, and even then there was still so little that he understood about it.

Because of this, he claimed to have seen many possible futures: a 1984 England ruled by an oppressive and fascistic government that nearly tortured him to death and came close to scrapping the Time Machine;  a 1985 England where a battle between government-made superhumans Miracleman and Kid Miracleman killed 40,000 and led to a totalitarian world order under the former;  a 2277 England devastated by resource wars that developed in the wake of a nuclear war between America and China;  and many more, some utopian, some dystopian, others downright apocalyptic. The Traveller then explained that as the only person who had even an inkling of all the ways that history could go from that point onward, he felt an enormous weight on his mind and needed to tell someone - to an old friend who might understand.

However, there was more to Nebogipfel's visit than nostalgia and venting. Just when he was at the end of his rope, he had stumbled upon one future where, after a protracted world war in the mid-20th century, the world eventually united in a benevolent technocratic dictatorship. He believed that if he could describe this timeline and have it preserved, even as fiction, it just might come to pass after all. He explained as much as he could to Wells, who relished both the opportunity to change the world with his writing and the idea of a socialist utopia. Again wanting to preserve his anonymity, Nebogipfel asked Wells to write an introduction crediting this vision of the future to a fictional Dr. Philip Raven's use of precognitive dreams. *The Shape of Things to Come* was released in 1933.

Before leaving once more to points unknown, Wells asked Nebogipfel if he could tell him how he would die. The Traveller said that he could not be certain, but in the timeline involving the technocratic world order, he read that Wells had died at the age of 97 in a London poorhouse, despite his books making millions around the world.

### Death, Life, and Disappearance

In 1946, Nebogipfel made one final visit to this timeline to see how this possible future was shaping up. To his shock, he discovered that though the war with Germany did indeed happen, it ended far sooner than expected, among other drastic differences - making him one of few English citizens disappointed by the end of World War II. He then made his way to the home of HG Wells upon realizing that Wells's 80th birthday was approaching and that the year marked the 55th year of their acquaintance. While making his way to Wells's London residence, he remembered the other prediction he made when they last met and rushed to his friend's London home. Upon arrival, Nebogipfel learned from a month-old newspaper near the doorstep of a nearby residence that the author had recently passed away.

Consumed with grief, Nebogipfel set the Time Machine for the year prior and paid a final visit to HG Wells, pretending as if this were still his present. He took up residence in London and stayed for the remainder of Well's life, living day by day to ensure that he could be there for his friend and make up for all the time he was not there. They would relate their respective adventures to each other - Nebogipfel of his journeys through time, Wells of his experiences as a famed historian and activist.

When Wells died the year after, Nebogipfel understood that he, too, was aging. All his time travel still took time, and it had been more than half a century since the Time Machine's maiden voyage. Left with nothing to tether him to this timeline, the Time Traveller took a newspaper saved from the date when Wells died, carefully placed it on the doorstep of his residence, and sank once more into the timestream. He has not been seen since.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "The Chronic Argonauts" (short story). This story was H.G. Wells’ first story involving a time machine, predating *The Time Machine* by seven years, and the first story in history to really develop the concept of a time machine at all. The Time Traveller of *The Time Machine* goes unnamed in that book, and some fan-written sequels say it’s because he’s embarrassed of his real name. What’s more embarrassing for a Victorian Englishman than Moses Nebogipfel?
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 *The Time Machine* (book), the main work on which this article is based.
3. ↑ *Doctor Who* (TV series), of course, specifically the Sixth Doctor serial "Timelash." In the original episodes, The Doctor and Peri Brown meet a man named Herbert, who is revealed at the end to be (gasp!) Herbert George Wells. Other than exchanging Wells for one of his characters, the rest is identical. Also, I specified that Peri Brown has an English heritage to account for her use of British terms and occasional accent slips on the show, which received much criticism from American viewers.
4. ↑ *1984* (book)
5. ↑ *Miracleman* (comic series), specifically Alan Moore’s run.
6. ↑ This would be the world of the *Fallout* video game series. Though none of the games explicitly tell or present the state of England in this post-apocalyptic age, a few British characters do appear in the series. Emil Pagliarulo, lead designer of *Fallout 3* and *4*, has said, "... We just allude, a little bit, to the state of the rest of the world. We like to leave a lot to the players' imaginations, and somebody like Tenpenny serves as a catalyst for those thoughts." This right has been exercised, if only a bit, for this article.
7. ↑ *The Shape of Things to Come* (book). As with "The Chronic Argo," this too is conflated with The Time Machine into the saga of one man and his relationship with an author who immortalized him.

## Additional Notes

1. ↑ The book was written in 1894 and serialized in the first half of 1895, and at the end of the novella, Wells wrote that it had been three years since the Time Traveller shared his tale.
2. ↑ According to the St. Petersberg Times article reporting on the death of HG Wells in 1946, he wrote his own obituary in the 1930s.