I’m going to try this in ‘Cafe Society,’ though I suspect it might be just as appropriate for GQ. Regardless…
I recall reading some time ago about a plan HG Wells and an entrepreneur hatched to create what would today be called ‘motion simulator rides’ based on Wells Time Machine book. Paying customers would get into the Time Machine simulator and experience the rapid passing of days (flickering lights) and then be treated to famous scenes from history (painted tableaus or dioramas). The ride was never built, but I always found this precursor to modern amusment parks and virtual reality very interesting.
The problem is I can’t seem to find a reference to this historical tidbit any longer. Does anyone else recall this plan and can anyone give me a cite to prove it was real?
Well, I don’t know anything about that, but I do know that some production company is making a Time Machine movie with Jeremy Irons, I think. They did some filming right here in Troy, NY, because it has that “turn of the century feel.”
In other words, Troy’s a dumpy ghetto town. Oh yeah!
I’ve read this too, and like the rest of you, I can’t remember where. I’ll have to check my reference books tonight.
I feel reasonably certain that Wells’ friend was not Alfred Jarry, the weird diminutive Frenchman who wrtote Ubu Roi and invented “pataphysics”. You can read about him in The Big Book of Weirdos. Philip Jose Farmer put him in his contribuition to “Tales of Ringworld”.
Underground cartoonist-turned syndicated comic strip artist Bill Griffith also wrote comix stories about the little shitr, possibly because he was almost as bizarre as Zippy the Pinhead.
As don’t ask noted above, it was Robert Paul who collaborated with H.G. Wells on this. According to John Baxter’s Science Fiction in the Cinema (1970 – a wretched book, but sometimes a useful reference) Wells and Paul applied for a patent on October 24, 1895 for a device to duplicate the effects Wells had descbed in his novel The Time Machine a year earlier. “The plan might have worked had either man possessed the money to develop it. However, Wells moved on to minence as a writer and Paul to frustration and obscurity as a pioneer of the cinema.”
I don’t know if anyone cares about this anymore, but I’ve stumbled across a extraordinarily good reference on this point. Terry Ramsaye, in his book A Million and One Nights devotes an entire chapter to Paul and Wells and this proto-interactive ride. The book was published in 1926, and re-issued in 1954. Chapter 12 is entitled “Paul and ‘The Time Machine’”. The bulk of the chapter has been reprinted in Focus on the Science Fiction Film, ed. William Johnon (Prentice-Hall, 1972).
Ramsaye makes a very good case that Wells’ story was itself inspired by the newly-invented motion picture, that the descriptions he gives of things as seen from the Time Machine are the way they appear when movies are speeded up or ru backwards. Ramsaye also quotes Pauls patent, British patent #19984.
