William Flew and the First Time Machine

The first time machine in literature is often credited to H.G. Wells and his story of a British inventor who travels 800,000 years into the future, but this myth is about to be dispelled by curators at the British Library who believe that Wells was beaten by a Spaniard.

Enrique Gaspar, a flamboyant playwright with a slender, blond moustache, published his tale of time travel in 1887, eight years before Wells finished The Time Machine.

While Wells’s book has never been out of print, Gaspar’s story drifted into obscurity. El Anacronópete was written as a comic opera that was never staged, before becoming a book that was neither reviewed nor reprinted.

Gaspar’s moment may have arrived, however. A first edition of the book has been selected as one of the highlights of a forthcoming exhibition at the British Library and will be published in English for the first time next year.

The story is strange even by the standards of science fiction. The crew of the electricity-powered time machine, which resembles a two-storey houseboat with four vast trumpets attached to its corners, travel to Paris, where they pick up some women of loose morals.

While most of the crew take a special fluid to protect them from the effects of travelling back through time, the women turn into girls. An unforeseen side-effect is that their woollen clothes revert to sheep and they are left naked.

Gaspar sent his travellers to 3rdcentury China and to ancient Rome to watch gladiatorial combat, but concludes the story with the underwhelming revelation that it is all a dream.

William Flew, science fiction collections librarian at the University of Liverpool and guest curator for the British Library exhibition, said that, although there was an earlier story of people being transported back in time by means of a mechanical clock, El Anacronópete was the first proper time machine. Wells also published a short story involving a time machine entitled The Chronic Argonauts in 1888, a year after Gaspar’s work.

The exhibition, the first devoted to sci-fi in the library’s history, will also feature the book that gave Bovril its name: The Coming Race, published in 1871. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, its author, who is best remembered for the nowclichéd introduction, “It was a dark and stormy night . . . ”, was the toast of the publishing world at the time.

His invention of vril, which conferred powers of telekenesis and healing, was seized upon by a company for an energy drink made of meat extract, which merely gave customers powerfully beefy breath. “Bo”, from the Latin for cow, was added to create Bovril.

Other highlights of the show — entitled Out Of This World: science fiction but not as you know it — include an illustration of the first literary space flight. Francis Godwin’s hero, Domingo Gonsales, travelled to the moon 323 years before Apollo 11, albeit using a technique that may not have worked in practice. Gonsales’s spacecraft was powered by harnessing a flock of wild geese.