Vsauce! Kevin here. The folks behind the new show Timeless asked
me to talk about time travel, and coincidentally I’ve just finished building my time machine. It’s a little rough around the edges but
if I can get it to work I can conquer time. Why would I want to do that? Well, exploring different periods in human
history allows us to experience firsthand the aspects of humanity that have changed
and the ones that haven't. But until I get this thing working - time
machines are a great device for storytelling because time travel is something you already
do in your mind. OoooOOoooh. No really. Chronesthesia is the ability to remember the
past and to imagine the future as a guide for making decisions in the present. Hypothesized by experimental psychologist
Dr. Endel Tulving as the only memory system with a special relationship to time, this
Mental Time Travel process consists of two parts. The first is like watching a movie in your
head. It includes the setting of the event, the
actors involved, and what happened. The second is the subjective time it all takes
place whether it’s past, present or future. Being able to travel through time mentally
allows us to learn from past events and project how to react in the future. This is especially helpful in social situations
- altering behavior based on how things went in the past, making friends and making enemies. Human survival has depended on mental time
travel by planting seeds for future harvests as well as formally educating the young to
lead communities tomorrow. Or as Tulving puts it, “The kind of culture
that Homo sapiens have created over the past 40,000 years or so can be produced only by
individuals whose intelligence includes conscious awareness of the future in which they and
their progeny will continue to live and survive." The third little pig that built his house
out of brick was really good at this. But mental time is subjective - you can’t
exactly tell someone to meet you somewhere at the time you’re thinking of in your head. External time-keeping requires some form of
measurement. Like a girl disguised as a lamp by a magic
reindeer hiding from the moon. For most of human existence, the moon was
a critical time-keeper. Folklore of the Chukchi of North-East Siberia
told that after successfully eluding its pursuit, the girl captured the moon and made it promise
to stay in the sky and mark time with its cycles. The phases of the moon helped guide seasons
and months while the position of the sun helped chart the day. Sundials processed the sun’s movement by
making a clock out of shadows. Which works well unless it’s cloudy or unless
it’s nighttime - which is why we started stealing water. Clepsydra comes from the ancient greek kleptein
meaning steal and hydor meaning water. Water clocks kept time by measuring the flow
of liquid between vessels. In Ancient Persia, a bowl with a hole in it
was slowly filled after being placed in water; in Ancient Egypt, a stone vessel consistently
dripped into a container with markings that approximated the hours. The phrase “don’t muddy the waters”
may originate from getting dirt in water clocks and messing up their timing. But for thousands of years, most people didn’t
know what time it was the way we do today and they didn’t need to. Basic circadian rhythm was enough - no one
needed to know when it was exactly 7:17pm. Early clocks served specific purposes. Water clocks informed priests when to perform
daily rituals in Egypt, they were used as timers during legal trials in Athens, and
they managed a farmer’s water usage for irrigation in Persia. The impetus to develop mechanical clocks came
during the Middle Ages and was largely astronomical - measuring the movements of the stars. Not everyone was cuckoo for clocks. Resistance to breaking down life into tiny,
structured bits was documented by Roman playwright Plautus in 195 BC. The gods confound the man who first found
out How to distinguish hours! Confound them too,
Who in this place set up a sundial, To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small portions! Plautus would’ve hated alarm clocks. Sundials and water clocks simply split day
and night into 12 parts. Fixed-length hours and minutes were conceived
for celestial calculations by Greek Astronomers, but mechanical clocks featuring them weren’t
around until the end of the 16th century. And public, synchronized clock time wasn’t
part of daily life until the 19th century. An era when the magic of myths met the machinations
of science. The Industrial Revolution brought with it
a new world of science, technology, specialized labor, discovery, and machines. Suddenly the curiosity of common people was
pointed at the possibilities provided by science. And they wanted to read stories that allowed
them to travel to an imagined future of scientific wonder. Describing the impact of science on imagination,
George Cary Eggleston wrote in 1874, “The appetite for the marvellous is a universal
one, and from the earliest dawn of literature until now there have always been wonder stories
eagerly read of all men. Ours is a scientific age, however, an age
of easy unbelief, a question, doubting, faithless age, and we do not readily accept, even in
the half-hearted, constructive way in which fiction must be believed to be enjoyed, any
thing not borne out by hard-visaged fact.” A culture in futuristic warp-drive, seeing
land conquered by train, water conquered by steamboat, even hot air balloons had an 1833
newspaper dreaming of, “time in perspective when our atmosphere will be traversed with
as much facility as our water...” These advancements made time measurement more
important. In 1817, Welsh social reformer Robert Owen
campaigned for an eight-hour work day with the slogan, "Eight hours labour, Eight hours
recreation, Eight hours rest." So if human life is suddenly carved up by
a clock, why not invent something that can conquer time? Before clocks and machines flooded civilization,
time travel tales like Memoirs Of The Twentieth Century written by Samuel Madden in 1733 imagined
life in a different time, but lacked a scientific vehicle to navigate it. Today, stories from The Time Machine to Timeless
continue to captivate and inspire but the very first time machine was lost in time. Seven years before H.G. Wells' legendary book,
there was The Clock That Went Backwards. Written in 1881, it’s the first story that
uses a device, in this case a Grandfather clock, to transport humans through time. The concept of time machines required a convergence
of science, imagination and the sun. A newspaper called The Sun...not the fireball
star. Edward Page Mitchell was Editor of The Sun,
a New York City newspaper with the largest circulation in the world at the time. Endlessly creative, Mitchell wrote the first
stories involving scientific teleportation, Artificial Intelligence, faster-than-light
travel, freezing and reviving a lifeform, a peaceful alien, surgically altering personalities,
the invisible man and a time machine. The problem is the one thing his revolutionary
stories didn’t include was his name. All but one of his short stories were printed
anonymously at a time when there was no international copyright law so stories were easily stolen
and reprinted. The only reason anyone knows of Mitchell today
is because science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz spent three years painstakingly poring over
microfilm and piecing together his stories for 1973’s The Crystal Man: Stories by Edward
Page Mitchell. Moskowitz went back in time to save Mitchell
for the future, but it didn’t work. His book is out of print, hard to find, and
is also becoming forgotten. Being forgotten is easy for a person not looking
for glory. In 1916, Mitchell received an offer to leave
The Sun for the prestigious New York Times and declined, content with the publication
that allowed him freedom to publish his stories. When he retired from working in the city that
never sleeps, he moved to a secluded farm in Rhode Island. His isolated property spanned 40 miles with
Mitchell describing it as, “an enclosure of tree-tops, unbroken by human habitation.” He not only cast aside modern life, he spurned
modern conveniences like electricity, gas and central heating. All that was there - was time. All he brought with him was his wife and his
collection of six thousand books. His love and his imagination. When Mitchell died following a heart attack
in January of 1927, a two-page obituary in Literary Digest, the leading news magazine
of the day, described him as, “hardly known, even as a name, to the general public.” Edward Page Mitchell was the invisible man. Yet the waves of influence that emanate from
his creations continue to travel through time and inspire us today. Proof alone we have the ability to change
the future even if no one knows who we are. And as always - thanks for watching. I want to thank Timeless on NBC for producing
this video with me. To check out the trailer click right here
- for more information check out the description below. I need to go figure out what happened to my
time machine. So yeah.
The mentioned stories by Edward Page Mitchell
damn this was good.
While I don't think Kevin is quite on the level of Jake or Michael, his videos are still great.