A dinner host enthralls his guests with an extraordinary scientific experiment.
HG Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) opens with ‘the Time Traveller’ holding forth over the dinner table on the subject of Time as the fourth dimension, and the possibility of time travel. His guests are reluctant to follow where he leads, so he runs to his workshop and returns with a tiny, intricate mechanism in brass and ivory.
The brilliant but dangerously obsessive Dr Griffin decides that the end justifies the means.
The stories of H.G. Wells repeatedly warn that scientific research can be dangerously obsessive. In the case of Dr Griffin, however, the obsessive had become the psychopathic, as he revealed when telling an old college acquaintance about his own all-consuming project – to turn a man invisible.
Muddle-headed inventor Professor Cavor needs to think aloud, and for reasons of his own Mr Bedford is anxious to listen.
Mr Bedford has complained about Professor Cavor’s habit of humming loudly as he passes by, thinking scientific thoughts, on his regular afternoon walk. As a result, the Professor’s walks have lost their magic, and Bedford feels guilty.