Time Flies - a brief history of time machines

The date 21 October 2015 is Back to the Future Day - the point in time to which the second installment of the famous film trilogy propelled its protagonists in what at the time (the film was released in 1989) seemed a far-off and wondrous place..

To mark the occasion, Radio 4 put Peter Snow in a time machine of his own so he could travel backwards and forwards to discover how the past has shaped our lives today, and explore what might become of us in the future... So we thought we'd take the opportunity to look back at some of the more memorable temporal shifting devices from film, television and literature.

The Time Machine was the first major novel written by HG Wells, published in 1895 and based on an earlier short story he wrote called the Chronic Argonauts. It was an instant bestseller. In the book, a 'Time Traveller' has a machine that transports him over 800,000 years into the future, where he meets the Eloi people, seemingly happy but pretty useless, and the brutish Morlocks who live underground and seem to do all the work that keeps this future world going. Wells' story is considered to be a metaphor for the capitalist society the author observed in his own time and has been adapted for film, television and radio.

One of the most iconic of all time machines, the Type 40 time and space machine, Time and Relative Dimension in Space... or TARDIS as we tend to call it is an apparently small blue police box used by Doctor Who to travel the universe, dodging Daleks, Cybermen, the Slitheen, and more. The TARDIS first appeared on UK television screens in November 1963 (watch a clip of this moment here) and is better equipped than most houses, with a library, a swimming pool, a boot room and a huge wardrobe, to cope with the Doctor’s changing appearance. It used to change its exterior appearance on each trip but it broke a chameleon circuit and got stuck as a police box. Wonder if he’s tried turning it on and off again?

The time machine, known as the Time Door or Time Displacement Equipment (TDE), in the 1984 film The Terminator, is predictably, a teensy bit brutal. Housed in Los Angeles, in 2029, it sends you back but…um... leaves you there. It works by generating a bioelectric field and, conveniently for film audiences, does not work on clothes, so time travellers have to be in the nip. Hence, Terminator star, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s memorable line in the film "I need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle" uttered when he appears, sprawled naked, in the middle of the road.

In the 1985 film, Back to the Future, Dr Emmett "Doc" Brown's time machine comes in the form of a modified DeLorean car, which combined with a 'flux capacitor', and a little plutonium, accidentally transports our hero Marty McFly back to 1955. While there, he interferes with his then school-student parents' love life and introduces them to rock and roll music before making his way back to his own time and a happy ending thanks to some unlikely science involving lightning bolts. Two sequels followed in which the DeLorean transported Marty and the Doc forward to 21 October 2015 where cars flew, robot drones captured the news and 'skate' boards hovered, as well as taking them back to the year 1885. The rest is, well, history.

"I mark the hours, every one, Nor have I yet outrun the Sun.
My use and value, unto you, Are gauged by what you have to do."

This is the inscription on Hermione Granger's Time-Turner, given to her by Professor McGonagall in the Harry Potter novels by JK Rowling, and their film adaptations. For any Muggles among you, a Time-Turner is a pendant in which an Hour Reversal Charm has been encased in an hourglass. You go back an hour for every turn of the hourglass. Most of us would use it to find out the Lottery numbers or at least avoid a parking ticket but Hermione, being the swot that she is, used it to allow herself to attend more classes. Typical.

So, here's an exception to our set of otherwise fictional time machines... and well, it's not technically a time machine, but the Large Hadron Collider built by scientists under the French-Swiss border might just be the closest we get. In this giant machine, two beams of particles race in opposite directions around the circumference of a 17-mile, circular tunnel. The particles are guided by more than a thousand cylindrical, supercooled magnets, and crash into each other at nearly the speed of light. Now, this should in effect replicate, and allows us to see, what happened when the universe began... No, we don’t understand it either, but in short a mummy particle and a daddy particle have a special cuddle and then they have a baby which is called the world. OK?

Peter Snow Returns to the Future is on Radio 4, weekdays at 13.45 until 23 October... or you can listen to the future and hear every episode online first.