The History of Time Travel (2014) Movie Script
1
You're watching, History Television.
In 1895 writer H.G. Wells
published his science fiction
masterpiece "The Time Machine."
This novel would be one in a
long line of literature, motion
pictures, and television shows
depicting man breaking the laws of time and
space to travel beyond his present existence.
One of the great struggles, if not the
greatest struggle, has been man versus time.
I mean, we always want more.
We are prisoners to time. Mankind
has always been fascinated with
the idea of escaping from it.
To be able to go back in time
and fix a mistake or change
the outcome of a future event.
It's a tantalizing prospect.
Could it even be possible?
Well what did Einstein think?
Due to the extraordinary work of two men,
Edward Page, his son Richard,
and the personal tragedy that drove
them, time travel became a reality.
Anne told me that Edward
worked for the government,
but even she didn't know what he did.
Time Travel? I always that that
sounded like a bunch of bull----.
I can only imagine what
it must have been like...
...to have been there when he actually
did it.
We're no longer bound to the rules of time,
but what of the rules of morality?
It changed everything.
Storytellers hold a special
place in the history of mankind.
From the fables of Aesop
to the Brothers Grimm,
we look to storytellers to give
us truth about human nature and
our place within the world.
To discuss the genre of time travel,
it's place within science fiction,
and how it ultimately became a reality,
we talked with noted author
and screenwriter Kevin Ulrich.
Ulrich is the creator of the popular
time travel series "Nic of Time."
We meet up with him at a book
signing in Los Angeles, California.
Time travel had already been a
popular genre even before science fiction.
You have fantasy stories where
someone is magically transported to the past
like Mark Twain's "A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur's Court"
or they wake up in the
future like "Rip Van Winkle."
Even Charles Dickens' "A Christmas
Carol" has elements of time travel with
Christmas Past, Present, and Future.
To discuss the history of science
fiction becoming science fact
we talked with Professor Edward
Yarborough of Harvard University.
Prof. Yarborough is a
professor of American History
and one of the world's foremost
authorities on the history of time travel.
Before time travel became a reality
mankind was always intrigued with
how it could possibly work
and many ideas and theories were purposed.
For many years I subscribed
to the multiverse theory.
Which is that there can be numerous timelines
and parallel universes running
concurrently with our own.
For an example...
...if I go back in time and
stop the Lincoln assassination
I would immediately create a new
timeline which branches off from the old one.
It is within this timeline
that Lincoln would live.
If I were to travel into the future,
it would be the future of that new alternate
timeline not the one I originally came from.
Another possibility was
the fixed timeline theory.
Now in the fixed timeline theory if you were
to go back in time and accidentally
kill someone you haven't altered
the course of history,
you were already a part of it.
You were always meant to go back in
time and accidentally kill that person.
Your future was already a part of
the past, and you couldn't change it.
To discuss the hard science of time
travel and the possibility of paradoxes
with meet with Dr. Jack
Fincher of Yale University.
Dr. Fincher is an astrophysicist specializing
in quantum mechanics
and the author of two New York
Times bestselling books on the subject.
An interesting side effect to the
fixed timeline theory is the infinite loop.
Now for example, say we take
my grandfather's pocket watch...
...lets say I go back in
time and I lose the watch.
Later on my grandfather finds the
watch and many years later gives it to me.
Now the question becomes, where
did the watch originally come from?
Had I not gone back in
time and lost the watch
my grandfather never would have
found it in order to give it to me,
my grandfather couldn't have given
it to me if I hadn't lost it.
So the pocket watch has now
become stuck in an infinite loop.
The final aspect of time travel
we will explore is the moral
implication of altering time.
We meet with philosopher Dr. Adam Lindquist,
international lecturer and a highly regarded
voice in the world of ethics.
Most people had a basic
understanding of what time travel was,
or what it could be, from
movies, TV shows, and books.
They also realized the moral
can of worms it would open.
But we were all unprepared
for when it actually happened.
August 2, 1939, Physicists
Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein,
concerned by Nazi Germany's
research into nuclear weapons,
send a letter to American
President, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The "Einstein-Szilard Letter"
warned President Roosevelt
about the Nazi nuclear program
and urged him to create our own
program to counter the threat from Germany.
One month latter Nazi Germany invades Poland
and plunges Europe into war.
But it isn't until early 1942, when
America has entered the war,
that research into our own
program begins in earnest.
However by this time Adolph Hitler
has already turned his attention to
something beyond nuclear fusion.
In July of 1942 Einstein writes
another letter to President Roosevelt.
Einstein was made aware,
by sources back in Germany,
that the Nazis were experimenting
in the manipulation of time and space.
Einstein was very concerned about the Nazis
actually becoming successful in doing this.
He considered it and even
bigger threat then the Atomic bomb.
After receiving Einstein's letter President
Roosevelt meets with him in secret.
Soon after the president
establishes a top secret
research initiative code
named "The Indiana Project".
The project's main objective:
To produce a machine
capable of traveling
through and altering time.
The Indiana Project begins in
secret in a small facility just
outside Portland, Indiana.
Initially the program consists
of a small group of scientists
but it soon expands to included
several hundred workers.
Only a select few know about
the project's true objective.
Washington was spending millions of dollars
to fund the Indiana Project over the course
of the war
and the Pentagon was not happy
with the lack of, tangible, results.
By 1944 the tide had turned in
Europe and an Allied victory over
Nazi Germany was inevitable.
To offer insight into the
Indiana Project's importance
and place within the Pentagon we
talked with General Douglas Sanborn.
When Germany fell and
the Nazi threat was subdued
the Pentagon couldn't decide
what to do with the Indiana Project.
The project had it's supporters
but some saw no reason why they
should continue funding it.
They felt the money could be better spent
in preparation for the invasion of Japan.
On August 6, 1945 the United States drops
an atomic bomb upon the
Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Steadfast the Japanese
government refuses to surrender.
Three days later a second bomb
is dropped over Nagasaki.
On August 14th Japan surrenders
and the second world war ends.
With the war now over many
government projects are either
shut down or severely cut,
but the Indiana Project manages to survive
due to it's supporters in the Pentagon.
They argued that the research
could be useful down the line.
The Indiana Project's budget is cut and many
of the scientist leave for other employment.
Among the researchers who remains
with the project is a young
physicist named Edward Page.
Edward Charles Page was born in
Boston, Massachusetts, on March 3rd 1916.
He grew up in an upper middle class family
the son of a doctor and socialite mother.
He developed a love for reading, especially
the science fiction stories of Jules Vern,
H.G. Wells, and the adventures
of Robert Louis Stevenson.
His love of science fiction would lead to
an interest in becoming a scientist himself.
After graduating high school
Edward enrolled at MIT.
He graduated from MIT in the Spring of 1942,
he was immediately offered a job from the
government to work at the Indiana Project.
In addition to government resources
and equipment, he was offered a full salary
and a house for both
himself and his wife Anne.
Anne Havard was born in Paterson,
New Jersey on May 25th, 1921.
A precocious child Anne had a love
of nature and science at an early age.
Anne moved with her parents to Boston
when she was around six years old.
She attended Brighton High
School, graduated valedictorian
and then was accepted
to MIT in the fall of 1939.
Anne was working as a research
assistant at MIT when she met Edward.
Spending long hours in the lab together
their relationship soon turned to romance.
Edward and Anne would marry
in June of 1941.
When Edward was offered the
government job Anne was pregnant
and not in the best of health.
She had wanted to stay on the
East coast to be near her parents,
but being the devoted wife
she went with Edward to Indiana.
She hoped the war would end
quickly so they could come home.
Soon after arriving in Portland,
Anne gave birth to their son, Richard.
Due to complications the birth had
been quite difficult and Anne
remained bedridden for several weeks.
Edward wasn't particularly good with the baby
and after a few days Anne called me to
come stay with them until she was well.
Anne's health improved and she grew fond
of motherhood and raising young Richard.
When the war was over Anne hoped
they would move back to Boston.
But in early 1946 Edward accepted
the position of head researcher
for the Indiana Project.
He took it very seriously and
devoted himself completely to it,
and as a result his relationship
with Anne would begin to strain.
Edward was spending more
and more time in the lab.
Due to the limited funds he ran a
very tight ship
and Edward ended up doing
most of the lab work himself.
Anne wrote me a letter in the fall of
forty-eight about how lonely she felt.
Edward was spending more time in the lab
and Richard had started elementary school.
She confided in me that she
hoped to have another baby.
Unfortunately another
child was not in her future.
In the summer of 1949 Anne had become
sick and was bedridden once more.
At first Anne just thought she had
the flu and so she stayed in bed,
but Edward was never really good at taking
care of anyone especially when they were sick
so Anne sent for her friend
Dorothy to come out and help.
I came as soon as I heard.
When I got there she was already
frail and was having difficulty breathing.
I just had a feeling she wasn't
going to make it though the night.
I tried to call Edward at his
office but there was no response.
I decided to call an ambulance
to take her to the hospital.
Apparently Edward had taken the phone off
the hook so that he wouldn't be disturbed.
So Dorothy sent her husband Mike
to the Indiana Project to get Edward
and bring him to the hospital.
By the time Mike drives him to
the hospital Anne had already died.
Edward was devastated.
It wasn't until after she died that we
found out she was suffering from polio.
Dr. Helen Cagle of John Hopkins
University is a specialist in the
treatment of infectious diseases.
We met with her to talk about the polio
epidemic in America during the 1940s and 50s.
In the summer of 1949 there was a serious
polio epidemic that swept through Indiana.
All public activities and gatherings were
banned to prevent the spread of the disease.
We think of polio as something
affecting young children, and infants,
but adults could contract
the disease as well.
Unfortunately Anne was one
of the unlucky ones who did.
Edward had no idea how sick she really was.
I told him he wasn't home enough to notice.
I thought Anne's death would
change him but it only made him worse.
Haunted by the death of his wife Edward
completely withdrew from everyday life
and spent his time in the lab.
Edward blamed himself for his wife's death.
I mean here he was a man of science
and he couldn't even save his own wife.
If he could invent a time machine
he could go back and save Anne.
He thought he could cheat
death through science.
All he needed was time.
Driven by remorse and regret Edward would
spend the next twenty years of his life
trying to find a way to travel through time.
By the 1960s the Indiana Project was
all but forgotten, due to the space race.
I mean, here we have NASA spending billions,
to beat the Russians to the moon,
but over here in Indiana still
Edward working in his little lab.
In the Fall of 1960 Edward's son
Richard follows in his father's
footsteps when he's accepted to MIT.
Richard and his father had an
unusual relationship since Anne's death.
Richard admired Edward, as a scientist,
and respected him as his father, but
they were never truly close.
Not as close as Richard wanted them to be.
Deep down I think becoming a physicist
was a way that Richard thought that
he could really connect with his father.
He had to get inside his world.
Richard graduates from MIT in 1968
and accepts a research position at
the University of Indiana.
When the space race was going on
NASA overshadowed everything,
including the Indiana Project.
It managed to survived just
simply by being under the radar.
But by the early 70s,
with the space race over
and Vietnam bleeding the
Pentagon dry, cuts had to be made.
That's when the Indiana Project
ending up on the chopping block.
Despite numerous letters from Edward
asking them to reconsider the idea
the Pentagon shuts down the
Indiana Project in the Fall of 1975.
To them they saw Edward as a relic
of the past, a crackpot, and they
thought his research was just a joke.
Edward was devastated. His
decades of research, his work, all gone.
It was like losing his wife all over again.
He couldn't take it.
On November 5th, 1975 Edward
Page suffers a major heart
attack and dies the following day.
He was 59 years old.
Richard takes the death of Edward very hard.
He waited his whole life,
he worked his whole life,
to have an opportunity to
spend some meaningful time
with him and it doesn't happen.
Richard returns to Portland after
Edward's death to sell his parent's home.
While cleaning out his parent's house
Richard makes an extraordinary discovery.
So Richard is boxing up his
father's personal belongings
when he finds a loose
floorboard under the bed.
Inside is his father's personal
journal detailing all of his
research into time travel.
Richard is blown away
by his father's journal.
He knew that Edward had been working for the
government and that his job was classified,
but he had no idea that this, was what he
was devoting his whole life toward.
In the journal Richard
finds a picture of his mother.
Written on the back, in his father
handwriting, is the message "In
time, I will save you."
That night Richard just
pours over his father's journal
and he realizes his father was very
close to making time travel a possibility.
This research was his father's legacy
and Richard took it upon
himself to prove his father right.
Taking up the challenge of his
father's work would prove to be more
difficult then Richard realized.
He would spend the next decade
trying to achieve his father's goal.
The idea of time travel is very seductive.
Richard started out to prove his
father's theories correct but it
soon became a personal obsession.
Like his father Richard withdrew from
society to completely focus on his work.
He rarely, if ever, seen outside the lab.
His students became very frustrated
he never showed up to class to
lecture he just showed up on test days.
Had Richard not continued his
father's journal this important
period in his life, and history itself,
would be a lost to us.
November 6th, 1985. I have
completed my father's legacy.
Forty years of combined research has
led me to construct a machine to move man
backwards and forward through time.
Today I became the first person to do so.
We know what Richard created
and we know that it worked.
But what we don't know, even to
this day, is how he did it.
He never reveals the secrets in his journal.
I can only imagine what
it must have been like...
...to have been there
when he actually did it.
The only thing we do know about
that night comes from the video
camera that Richard set up.
First there's the time machine itself.
It's surprisingly small, it looks
like two VCRs stacked on top of
each other with a controller.
Inspired by H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine"
Richard wanted something round
that could be turned either
direction to control the device.
His ultimate choice was quite appropriate
for the 1980s.
Richard Page built a time
machine out of an Atari!
Using the control knob of an Atari gaming
system Richard could
move himself through time.
Turning the controller to the
right sends you into the future.
Turning the knob to the
left sends you into the past.
The first time Richard uses the device
he decides to make only a very small jump.
He turns the knob and is
sent one minute into the future.
However Richard reappears to us
only a second latter.
This Richard is from the future.
Now this "Future Richard" waits exactly
one minute for the arrival of "Past Richard."
This "Future Richard" then tells "Past
Richard" to travel back in time one minute.
"Past Richard" travels back in
time to become "Future Richard."
Wrap your head around that.
Richard in his excitement of time
traveling and meeting himself,
decides to go back even further.
Without thinking it through Richard
decides to go back in time one day.
He turns the knob to the left, vanishes.
When he goes back in time one
day Richard fails to take into account
that there will not be a time machine waiting
for him because he has yet to complete it.
So he ends up spending the night
in a broom closet waiting for his
past self to finish the machine.
Richard quickly learned the
dangers of using such a device.
He realized that the
machine must be portable,
otherwise you could stuck in
the past with no way to come back.
To call Richard's achievement ground
breaking would be an understatement.
We are no longer bound to the rules of time.
But what of the rules of morality?
A machine that can alter history
is power that could be very
dangerous in the wrong hands.
Aware of the potential danger in
such a device Richard vows not to
go back in time and change things.
But he just can't help himself.
Pandora's Box has just been opened.
There was one thing that Richard always
wanted, and that was to see his mother again.
He has a machine that can do that
and not only can he see her again,
he doesn't have to lose her at all.
At the time that she died the Polio
vaccine was still several years away,
but in the 1980s that's no longer an issue.
Richard thinks long and hard
about what he plans to do.
He weighs the options, the pros,
the cons, but in the end he decides to do it.
Richard works for several months to
make a portable version of the time machine.
Unable to make it any smaller
Richard determines that the machine
would be something you wear like a backpack.
Now the machine only moves
you through time, not space.
You can't start off in New York
and go back in time to ancient Rome.
In order to do that you would
have to physically be in Italy.
Anne was born and raised
in Paterson, New Jersey
before her family moved to Boston
so Richard would need to go there first.
So he makes some calls and
tracks down the house she grew up in.
Acquiring a series of
polio and booster shoots.
Richard will travel back to the 1920s and
inoculate his newborn mother.
December 13th 1985. I am currently sitting
in a motel near my Mother's childhood home.
Polio vaccination and booster
shots lay on the table next to me.
In a few minutes I will use them to cure
my mother's illness and save her from death.
I write this with the knowledge
that my actions today may yield
unintended ramifications.
I only pray that it works.
It works. The time machine works.
December 5th 1987 will go down in history as
one of the most important dates for mankind.
Richard and Aden have
finally fulfilled their father's work.
It wasn't just a triumph for
mankind but a personal triumph as well.
However the triumph was to be short lived.
Immediately after their first successful test
Richard passes out.
Aden rushes his brother to his
hospital and begins treating him.
Even though he was a well
respected doctor Aden is stumped
by his brother's sudden illness.
He was concerned it might
be a side effect of the machine.
Now you have to remember that Aden
has only been working with the
device for the past few months.
Richard had been working
on it for thirteen years.
Aden was worried that there might
be some correlation with long
time exposure to the device.
Richard was in a comatose state
for three days. Aden was baffled.
On the third day Richard literally jumps
out of bed and happily embraces his brother.
Aden was taken aback. He said
Richard hugged him as if they
haven't seen each other in years.
Aden runs some test but finds
nothing medically wrong with his
brother and releases him that evening.
Returning to the lab Richard tells
his brother about a dream he had
while he was in the hospital.
It's a dream about their mother and
what their life would have been like
had she not died giving birth to Aden.
It's the one thing they
both have always wanted.
Aden more so because he never knew her.
It's the reason why he became a doctor.
Richard tells him, if a doctor had
been there when their mother went
into labor she wouldn't have died.
Aden begins to figure out where
Richard is going with this train of thought.
And he wants nothing to do with it.
He had a hard enough time with the
fact that his brother had actually
built a working time machine.
But to go back in time and deliver
yourself? It was just too much.
It's actually not that crazy
if you really think about it.
Richard and Aden debate throughout
the whole night until Aden
reappears. The machine works!
Aden has now become the
first person to travel through time.
Richard asks Aden what it
felt like to travel through time
but before he can say anything
Aden inexplicably passes out.
Richard takes Aden to the hospital where
he spends the next three days in a coma.
When Aden wakes up from his coma
he is by all accounts perfectly healthy.
The doctors can't find
anything wrong with him.
Medically speaking the cause of
Aden's coma remains unknown. There's
just very little evidence to go on.
The only rational explanation is
the time machine.
Curiously Richard is not at his
brother's bedside during those three days.
He only returns on the day that
Aden wakes up from the coma.
It's almost as if he knew what was going to
happen.
Considering he built a
time machine, maybe he did.
January 29th, 1990. I arrived at the
hospital this morning anticipating
the Aden would soon recover.
A few minutes after I entered his
room Aden wakes from his coma.
He told he understood what had
happened to him and what we needed to do.
Those fourteen years that Richard and Aden
spent while working together on the time
machine were leading up to an ultimate goal.
When Anne died they were
left with a cold and distant father.
They thought if only they could go back
in time and change one thing, just one,
everything else would work itself out.
Using the time machine they would go
back in time to 1953 and stop the car
accident that killed their mother.
They we're unprepared for
what was about to happen.
The time machine was on and it was stable.
Sixteen years after their father's death
his sons had completed his life work
and built the world's first time machine.
It is one of the great moments, if not the
greatest moment in the history of science.
The word history takes on
a whole new meaning now.
History is a living science because of
what they did.
Despite their accomplishments personal
tragedy casts a long shadow over their work.
Their mother's suicide in 1955
haunted them for the rest of their lives,
and I think it's what really drove
them, just like their father, to
try and create the time machine.
Edward was so obsessed with the
machine that he completely overlooked
the warning signs with Anne.
All her life she had been
plagued by terrible nightmares.
She had this reoccurring nightmare where she
was being repeatedly stabbed with needles.
She never understood why.
Even though Anne was a lovely person
and a wonderful mother she had a
dark side that was tormenting her.
After narrowly surviving a car wreck
in 53 Anne became a different person.
She confided in me that she never
understand why she was still here.
She thought she should have died
in the accident.
Edward quite sadly is oblivious
to his wife's pain and suffering.
He is so obsessed with creating
the time machine that he is
squandering the time he has.
In Edward's mind once he has the machine
built he'll have all the time in the world.
Unfortunately for Edward time ran out.
On February 29, 1956 after sending Richard
and Aden to school Anne commits suicide.
She was 35 years old.
She left a note saying it was
the only way to cure her illness.
Richard and Aden come home from
school and find their mother dead.
Richard was fourteen and Aden was only five.
I can't imagine what that
does to you, psychologically
and I have no doubt that it was on their
minds as they were finishing the machine.
The temptation was certainly there
for them to go back and to try and stop it
but Richard realize that the best way to
save their mother was through their father.
March 6th 1994. After much debate Aden
and myself have concluded that the reason
our mother committed suicide was the
that our father was never there for her.
His obsession with the machine
caused her to feel alienated and alone.
Had my father been able to complete
his research in her lifetime things
may have turned out differently.
We can only speculate what might have
happened had they actually tried to go back.
July 1944. Racing against
time the Indiana Project
works around the clock trying to find
the break through they desperately need.
The Manhattan Project was making
great strides with the atomic bomb
but the Indiana Project was falling way
behind, until Edward Page comes along.
Edward Page, a young researcher
who had been working in the
Indiana Project for several years,
stuns his colleagues when he not
only creates a series of equations
that would produce time travel
he builds a functioning prototype as well.
Edward's research was
years ahead of it's time.
We're still not sure how he was able
to reach the conclusions that he did.
People would ask him and he
just would say "It came to me."
As far as the military was concerned
we now possessed the power to
rewrite history as we saw fit.
They wanted to immediately go back
in time and assassinate Hitler.
End the war before it even starts.
Now in control of a power far
greater then the atomic bomb
the United States prepares to alter history
and avoid the horrors of World War II.
However President Roosevelt has
second thoughts and he orders the
Indiana Project to stand down.
He felt that altering time was too risky
and could have unintended ramifications.
Roosevelt was right that
we shouldn't be playing God.
Our responsibility was to see that time
travel doesn't fall into the wrong hands.
However it was already too late.
On January 17th, 1945 Soviet agents,
who had infiltrated the Indiana Project,
steal Edward's prototype
along with all of his research.
They plant a bomb that destroys
several buildings at the facility.
The spies manage to make their
way back to Moscow with the time machine.
If you thought the idea of Hitler
with an atomic bomb was a bad idea,
then Stalin with a time
machine was terrifying.
The Indiana Project was in shambles.
They say not to put all your eggs in
one basket, well the Indiana Project did.
The Soviets now had the golden goose.
Surviving the explosion with
minor injuries Edward was tasked
with rebuilding the prototype.
Unfortunately most of his research
and notes were either stolen or destroyed
and he claimed it would
take several years to rebuild it.
Several years they did not have.
From the ashes of World
War II a new conflict rose.
The Cold War.
The United States and the Soviet
Union had emerged from the war
as the two dominant superpowers.
Immediately a battle for ideological
and military supremacy began.
With the time machine the Soviets clearly
had an unbelievable advantage over us.
Fortunately for us we still had Edward.
Unfortunately Edward had not
yet built a functioning prototype.
Everyone was wondering what was
going on.
Edward kept saying his research
has been set back by several years
but by 1947 the Pentagon began
to become deeply concerned.
Edward had built a time machine
before. Why couldn't he do it again?
Suspicion was beginning
to mount. What was he hiding?
People began to suspect that
Edward could be working for the Soviets.
They pointed to the fact that
once the prototype was stolen he
conveniently forgot how to build it.
The FBI and the newly formed CIA had
both begin monitoring Edward's activity.
Anne wrote me in the fall of 47 about how how
strange Edward's behavior had been of late.
He had become quite paranoid and was
convinced that people were following him.
On June 20th, 1948 Edward
resigns from the Indiana Project
and takes a teaching job at
Marshall College in upstate New York.
Edward claimed he wanted to
spend more time with his family.
Anne was expecting their second child
and he wanted to move back East so
she could be closer to her parents.
The Pentagon was very troubled
when Edward left the Indiana Project.
Especially going into academia
where they felt he might run
into communist sympathizers.
In fact many of them felt it was
only a matter of time before
Edward ended up in Moscow.
Meanwhile recent developments
had convinced the Pentagon
that the Soviets were already
altering time for their own purposes.
We really can't comprehend what
the Soviets did to the fabric of time.
All that we know is that they beat
us at everything, things they
shouldn't have even known about.
Time travel was the
only possible explanation.
With the time machine the Soviets
could have gone back in time and
prevented America from ever existing.
But they were smarter then that.
They realized that if they alter
the past previous to Edward Page
inventing the time machine,
that he might never invent it at all.
Recent history however would be up for grabs.
The Soviets found the time machine
to be an invaluable tool for espionage.
The Pentagon would be developing
a new secret weapons system
and somehow the Soviets would have one first.
We would be developing a new aircraft
and before we could even approve a prototype
the Soviets would be flying the damn thing.
It became quite clear
what the Soviets were doing.
They would wait for us to develop something,
a new tank, missile system, whatever,
and Soviet spies would smuggle
the design back to Moscow.
Then the Soviets would use the machine to go
back in time and "invent" it before we did.
Sputnik was based from
an entirely American design.
The day the blueprints were finalized was the
same day the Soviets launched it into orbit.
The Pentagon was understandably
going ballistic but there wasn't
anything we could do about it.
The Indiana Project was lost
without Edward, but there wasn't
really anyone who trusted him.
Soon after Edward begins his new career
as a college professor in upstate New York
Anne gives birth to their second
son, whom they name Aden.
This was a relatively happy period for
the Page Family, despite the shadow of
suspicion hanging over Edward.
Edward was still convinced that he was being
followed and his paranoia frightened Anne
but as long as he was working in the basement
with the boys his delusions would subside.
Richard and Aden loved working
in the basement with Edward.
They would spend all their time
together. They love being Dad's assistants.
Richard and Aden would
follow in their father's footsteps
and become physicists as
well, both graduating from MIT.
When Richard and then Aden
moved out of the house to go to college
Edward was left alone in his lab.
His paranoia had again returned
and Anne became concerned.
Especially after the moon landing.
This is a special report from
KRNK News. The space race is over.
Man has landed on the Moon.
I've just been handed an update.
We have a message from, Yuri Gagarin,
the first man to set foot upon the moon.
It reads...
"It's one small step for Russia,
one giant leap for Communism."
It was bad enough to have
lost the Vietnam War in 68
but to have them beat us to the
moon, it was just salt in the wound.
It one of those moments
you just don't forget,
like when President Nixon was assassinated
in Dallas. We all remember where we were.
What was suppose to be America's greatest
triumph had become a national nightmare.
The moon landing really galvanized
Edward to want to rebuild the time machine.
America had started its decline, Soviets
had become the dominant superpower
and Edward was determine to rebuild the
machine, go back in time, and stop them.
As Edward secretly begins rebuilding
the time machine in his basement
Anne becomes ever increasingly concerned.
Edward would spend all of his time
down in the basement, Anne told me.
She would ask him what he was
up too and he wouldn't tell her.
He would become very defensive.
He told her that as long as she doesn't
know anything they couldn't hurt her.
She didn't know who "they" were.
Edward's concerns were
actually reasonably justified.
He had kept a low profile since
leaving the Indiana Project but the
CIA still had an open case file on him
and were waiting for him to
do something to raise a red flag.
The Soviets had also been
keeping an eye on Edward.
They had hoped that the bombing
of the Indiana Project back in 45
would have killed him as well,
but when he survived they feared he
would rebuild another time machine.
When Edward left the Indiana Project under
a cloud of suspicion the Soviets determine
that he would not attempt
to rebuild the machine.
But if he ever did he would become a major
threat.
Edward's work progresses but
without government resources
he lacks access to equipment
he desperately needs.
Edward decides to contact his sons for help.
By the mid 1970s Richard and
Aden were both working for MIT.
Richard was a teacher in the
physics department and Aden was a
researcher working at the university.
Edward needed access to equipment at
MIT in order to continue his experiments
but he'd have to tell Richard
and Aden what he was up to.
Edward tells them about the Indiana
Project and his involvement in the
creation of a time machine.
Richard and Aden aren't sure what to believe.
Now here's the part where the
story takes a really strange turn.
Edward tells Richard and Aden that
he did not invent the time machine.
They did.
Edward tells Richard and Aden that back in 44
when he was working for the Indiana Project
that two time travelers from the future
gave him the time machine
as well as their research papers.
He tells Richard and Aden that
they were the two time travelers.
Richard and Aden believed
their dad had gone crazy.
His paranoia had turned into a full
fledged delusion.
Edward asked if he could run some experiments
in Richard's lab. Richard said no.
So Richard and Aden take their father home.
They talk with their mother
about Edward's mental state and
how he needs psychiatric help.
Edward keeps insisting he's not crazy,
but no one will listen.
Edward was not going
to take no for an answer.
On the night of July 28th, 1975 Edward is
caught breaking into Richard's lab at MIT.
Edward is booked with breaking and entering
and is taken to the police for questioning.
When Edward was question by the police
they asked him what was he doing in the lab
and he told them he was
gathering things for a time machine.
He told them about the Indiana
Project, the time travelers,
and how KGB and CIA were keeping tabs on him.
Edward's arrest certainly drew
the attention of the CIA and the KGB.
The police records indicated that he
talked to them about the Indiana Project.
Now whether the police
believed it or not was irrelevant.
Edward was now a liability and the
Pentagon was afraid he would go to the press.
But who would believe him?
Edward is released into Richard and Aden's
custody and they take him home to Anne.
They discuss the possibility
of having Edward committed.
The next day Richard and Aden
meet with the university president
to discuss having the charges
against Edward dropped.
Richard and Aden are able to have
the charges dropped on the condition
that Edward gets psychiatric help.
They return to their parent's
home to tell them the good news...
...and that's when they found them.
They found Edward first in the kitchen.
One bullet to the temple. They found Anne in
a bedroom closet where she had been hiding.
Richard and Aden were devastated. They
took the death of their parents very hard
but circumstances remained unclear.
The police investigation
into Edward and Anne's death
ruled that the crime was a murder
suicide carried out by Edward,
a man suffering from serious delusions.
Aden and Richard remained skeptical.
Despite Edward's delusions
Richard and Aden just couldn't believe
that their father would murder
their mother and then kill himself.
It just didn't make sense. Too
many things just didn't add up.
This was no suicide. This was clearly
a coordinated hit on a high value target.
They never found finger prints on the gun.
Edward shoots himself in the head and
then wipes his own fingerprints from the gun?
Give me a break. This
was a complete cover up.
The only question is who
was behind it. The KGB or the CIA?
While the cause of Edward and Anne's
death would be shrouded in controversy
for Richard and Aden there was
little for them to do but try
to move on with their lives.
Twenty years later Richard and
Aden are contacted by a realtor
about selling their parent's home.
After their parent's death
Richard and Aden never went back.
The house was abandoned. It
fell into disarray as did much
of the surrounding neighborhood.
A corporation came in and begin buying
a lot of the property to build a factory
and Richard and Aden agreed to sell.
Richard and Aden return to their
parent's home the day before it
is scheduled to be torn down.
They spend several hours looking around
the house to see if anything is worth saving.
In their parent's bedroom, Richard,
makes an extraordinary discovery.
After stepping on an uneven
floorboard and prying it loose
Richard finds his father's journal.
Richard and Aden are floored by what they
read.
Their father had been telling
them the truth, the whole time,
about The Indiana Project, about
the Soviets, the spies, the KGB,
time travelers, everything.
Inside the journal Richard and
Aden find a photo of their parents.
Written on the back
is the message In time you will save us.
Richard and Aden realize what they must do.
Richard and Aden begin the
task of rebuilding the time machine.
Edward's journal would provided the
basic blueprints for building the machine
but they would have to fill in the blanks.
The reason Edward was not able to rebuild
the time machine was because he never
had a chance to reverse engineer it
before the Soviets stole it.
The journal was just a holy
grail of information but it was incomplete.
It would be up to then to
finish their father's work.
They used whatever they could
find to help build the machine.
Spare parts, old machines, things
that the university wouldn't miss.
They would have used
an Atari if they had one.
Richard and Aden's activity
draws the attention of the university.
It also draws the attention
of both the CIA and the KGB.
After Edward and Anne's "death" the KGB
kept tabs on Richard and Aden's activity.
For twenty years they monitored
them waiting on them to make a move.
Richard and Aden both begin to
spend all of their waking hours
working on the time machine
and their colleagues and
students at MIT begin to take notice.
Students complained that Aden
only showed up to class to give tests.
Richard, his colleagues
very worried about him,
that he was spending way too much
time on non-university related projects.
The blackout is what
really got them in trouble.
On the evening of March 8th,
1995 at approximately 7:43pm
a power surge causes
the MIT campus to go dark.
The source of the power surge
is traced back to Richard's lab
Richard and Aden are both brought
before the university President
and reprimanded for misusing school
equipment for their own purposes.
They're both placed on temporary suspension.
The blackout makes national headlines
and a CIA investigation concludes
that Richard and Aden are
building a new time machine.
That's when they decided to pay a visit.
On their way home from the
meeting with the university president
both Richard and Aden are intercepted by
the CIA and taken to an undisclosed location.
The CIA inform Richard and Aden
that they know they are trying
to rebuild the time machine.
They warn them that the KGB is aware of
their activities and will try to kill them.
The CIA offers them protection and
funding in exchange for the time machine.
Richard and Aden really don't have a choice.
It's an offer they can't refused.
The Indiana Project which had
been defunct for decades is reopened
as Richard and Aden
set up a new research lab.
Richard and Aden make great strives towards
completing the machine but they're under
extreme pressure from the Pentagon to do so.
They now know the intense scrutiny
their dad was under when he was in
their position all those years ago.
With unlimited government resources
Richard and Aden are able to fill in
the gaps in their father's research.
The problem that Edward was
having when he originally tried
to reverse engineer the machine
was that many of the components were
beyond the limits of 1940s technology.
Richard and Aden were able solve
these problems with relative ease.
On November 12th, 1996, fifty years
after Edward's time machine was lost
Richard and Aden successfully rebuild it.
Richard and Aden had no intention
of turning the machine over to the
Pentagon when they finished it.
Edward's journal made it
very clear what they should do.
Richard tells Aden that
he himself must do it alone.
The only question is would it work?
That's the question that we'll
never know the answer to.
The explosion that brought an end
to Edward's prototype also brought
an end to the Indiana Project.
With their research set back by
years and the war drawing to a close
the Pentagon permanently
shuts the project down.
Once the war was over the Pentagon saw no
reason to keep funding the Indiana Project.
Time travel?
I always thought that
sounded like a bunch of bull----.
Edward's research into time
travel had been the most promising
and had it not been for that accident it
could have been a much different story.
Who knows what could have happened?
There's so many unknowns, so many
possibilities, so many might have beens.
The Indiana Project teaches us what
is truly important about time and
that is making every second count.
The accident really woke Edward
up to what his priorities were,
and that was spending
time with the ones he loved.
Edward and his family move back to Boston
where he accepts a teaching position at MIT.
After giving birth to their second
child, Aden, Anne return to
research work in the late 1950s.
Richard would follow in his father's
footsteps and become a physicist.
Aden becomes a doctor
specializing in neurology.
After a short battle with cancer Edward dies
peacefully in his sleep at the age of 77.
Anne passes away two years later.
In 1996 after a failed experiment
Richard suffers a stroke
and slips into a coma where he
remains to this day under the
watchful eye of his brother.
We were so close to making
time travel a possibility.
It would have changed the world, but will
we rediscover it?
I think it's only a matter of time.
And when we do there's going
to be a lot of questions to answer.
One of the great things about
being a science fiction writer is
the possibilities of "What if?"
What if Edward Page had invented time travel?
How would that effect us?
We experience time as we
perceive it, but if time could be altered
and was being altered would we perceive
that? Would we? That's the big question.
Would we even notice?
But until such a time when man is able
to leave the boundaries of time and space
the history of time travel will remain
within the realm of science fiction.
For Science Fiction Television this
has been The Theory of Time Travel.
You're watching, History Television.
In 1895 writer H.G. Wells
published his science fiction
masterpiece "The Time Machine."
This novel would be one in a
long line of literature, motion
pictures, and television shows
depicting man breaking the laws of time and
space to travel beyond his present existence.
One of the great struggles, if not the
greatest struggle, has been man versus time.
I mean, we always want more.
We are prisoners to time. Mankind
has always been fascinated with
the idea of escaping from it.
To be able to go back in time
and fix a mistake or change
the outcome of a future event.
It's a tantalizing prospect.
Could it even be possible?
Well what did Einstein think?
Due to the extraordinary work of two men,
Edward Page, his son Richard,
and the personal tragedy that drove
them, time travel became a reality.
Anne told me that Edward
worked for the government,
but even she didn't know what he did.
Time Travel? I always that that
sounded like a bunch of bull----.
I can only imagine what
it must have been like...
...to have been there when he actually
did it.
We're no longer bound to the rules of time,
but what of the rules of morality?
It changed everything.
Storytellers hold a special
place in the history of mankind.
From the fables of Aesop
to the Brothers Grimm,
we look to storytellers to give
us truth about human nature and
our place within the world.
To discuss the genre of time travel,
it's place within science fiction,
and how it ultimately became a reality,
we talked with noted author
and screenwriter Kevin Ulrich.
Ulrich is the creator of the popular
time travel series "Nic of Time."
We meet up with him at a book
signing in Los Angeles, California.
Time travel had already been a
popular genre even before science fiction.
You have fantasy stories where
someone is magically transported to the past
like Mark Twain's "A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur's Court"
or they wake up in the
future like "Rip Van Winkle."
Even Charles Dickens' "A Christmas
Carol" has elements of time travel with
Christmas Past, Present, and Future.
To discuss the history of science
fiction becoming science fact
we talked with Professor Edward
Yarborough of Harvard University.
Prof. Yarborough is a
professor of American History
and one of the world's foremost
authorities on the history of time travel.
Before time travel became a reality
mankind was always intrigued with
how it could possibly work
and many ideas and theories were purposed.
For many years I subscribed
to the multiverse theory.
Which is that there can be numerous timelines
and parallel universes running
concurrently with our own.
For an example...
...if I go back in time and
stop the Lincoln assassination
I would immediately create a new
timeline which branches off from the old one.
It is within this timeline
that Lincoln would live.
If I were to travel into the future,
it would be the future of that new alternate
timeline not the one I originally came from.
Another possibility was
the fixed timeline theory.
Now in the fixed timeline theory if you were
to go back in time and accidentally
kill someone you haven't altered
the course of history,
you were already a part of it.
You were always meant to go back in
time and accidentally kill that person.
Your future was already a part of
the past, and you couldn't change it.
To discuss the hard science of time
travel and the possibility of paradoxes
with meet with Dr. Jack
Fincher of Yale University.
Dr. Fincher is an astrophysicist specializing
in quantum mechanics
and the author of two New York
Times bestselling books on the subject.
An interesting side effect to the
fixed timeline theory is the infinite loop.
Now for example, say we take
my grandfather's pocket watch...
...lets say I go back in
time and I lose the watch.
Later on my grandfather finds the
watch and many years later gives it to me.
Now the question becomes, where
did the watch originally come from?
Had I not gone back in
time and lost the watch
my grandfather never would have
found it in order to give it to me,
my grandfather couldn't have given
it to me if I hadn't lost it.
So the pocket watch has now
become stuck in an infinite loop.
The final aspect of time travel
we will explore is the moral
implication of altering time.
We meet with philosopher Dr. Adam Lindquist,
international lecturer and a highly regarded
voice in the world of ethics.
Most people had a basic
understanding of what time travel was,
or what it could be, from
movies, TV shows, and books.
They also realized the moral
can of worms it would open.
But we were all unprepared
for when it actually happened.
August 2, 1939, Physicists
Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein,
concerned by Nazi Germany's
research into nuclear weapons,
send a letter to American
President, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The "Einstein-Szilard Letter"
warned President Roosevelt
about the Nazi nuclear program
and urged him to create our own
program to counter the threat from Germany.
One month latter Nazi Germany invades Poland
and plunges Europe into war.
But it isn't until early 1942, when
America has entered the war,
that research into our own
program begins in earnest.
However by this time Adolph Hitler
has already turned his attention to
something beyond nuclear fusion.
In July of 1942 Einstein writes
another letter to President Roosevelt.
Einstein was made aware,
by sources back in Germany,
that the Nazis were experimenting
in the manipulation of time and space.
Einstein was very concerned about the Nazis
actually becoming successful in doing this.
He considered it and even
bigger threat then the Atomic bomb.
After receiving Einstein's letter President
Roosevelt meets with him in secret.
Soon after the president
establishes a top secret
research initiative code
named "The Indiana Project".
The project's main objective:
To produce a machine
capable of traveling
through and altering time.
The Indiana Project begins in
secret in a small facility just
outside Portland, Indiana.
Initially the program consists
of a small group of scientists
but it soon expands to included
several hundred workers.
Only a select few know about
the project's true objective.
Washington was spending millions of dollars
to fund the Indiana Project over the course
of the war
and the Pentagon was not happy
with the lack of, tangible, results.
By 1944 the tide had turned in
Europe and an Allied victory over
Nazi Germany was inevitable.
To offer insight into the
Indiana Project's importance
and place within the Pentagon we
talked with General Douglas Sanborn.
When Germany fell and
the Nazi threat was subdued
the Pentagon couldn't decide
what to do with the Indiana Project.
The project had it's supporters
but some saw no reason why they
should continue funding it.
They felt the money could be better spent
in preparation for the invasion of Japan.
On August 6, 1945 the United States drops
an atomic bomb upon the
Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Steadfast the Japanese
government refuses to surrender.
Three days later a second bomb
is dropped over Nagasaki.
On August 14th Japan surrenders
and the second world war ends.
With the war now over many
government projects are either
shut down or severely cut,
but the Indiana Project manages to survive
due to it's supporters in the Pentagon.
They argued that the research
could be useful down the line.
The Indiana Project's budget is cut and many
of the scientist leave for other employment.
Among the researchers who remains
with the project is a young
physicist named Edward Page.
Edward Charles Page was born in
Boston, Massachusetts, on March 3rd 1916.
He grew up in an upper middle class family
the son of a doctor and socialite mother.
He developed a love for reading, especially
the science fiction stories of Jules Vern,
H.G. Wells, and the adventures
of Robert Louis Stevenson.
His love of science fiction would lead to
an interest in becoming a scientist himself.
After graduating high school
Edward enrolled at MIT.
He graduated from MIT in the Spring of 1942,
he was immediately offered a job from the
government to work at the Indiana Project.
In addition to government resources
and equipment, he was offered a full salary
and a house for both
himself and his wife Anne.
Anne Havard was born in Paterson,
New Jersey on May 25th, 1921.
A precocious child Anne had a love
of nature and science at an early age.
Anne moved with her parents to Boston
when she was around six years old.
She attended Brighton High
School, graduated valedictorian
and then was accepted
to MIT in the fall of 1939.
Anne was working as a research
assistant at MIT when she met Edward.
Spending long hours in the lab together
their relationship soon turned to romance.
Edward and Anne would marry
in June of 1941.
When Edward was offered the
government job Anne was pregnant
and not in the best of health.
She had wanted to stay on the
East coast to be near her parents,
but being the devoted wife
she went with Edward to Indiana.
She hoped the war would end
quickly so they could come home.
Soon after arriving in Portland,
Anne gave birth to their son, Richard.
Due to complications the birth had
been quite difficult and Anne
remained bedridden for several weeks.
Edward wasn't particularly good with the baby
and after a few days Anne called me to
come stay with them until she was well.
Anne's health improved and she grew fond
of motherhood and raising young Richard.
When the war was over Anne hoped
they would move back to Boston.
But in early 1946 Edward accepted
the position of head researcher
for the Indiana Project.
He took it very seriously and
devoted himself completely to it,
and as a result his relationship
with Anne would begin to strain.
Edward was spending more
and more time in the lab.
Due to the limited funds he ran a
very tight ship
and Edward ended up doing
most of the lab work himself.
Anne wrote me a letter in the fall of
forty-eight about how lonely she felt.
Edward was spending more time in the lab
and Richard had started elementary school.
She confided in me that she
hoped to have another baby.
Unfortunately another
child was not in her future.
In the summer of 1949 Anne had become
sick and was bedridden once more.
At first Anne just thought she had
the flu and so she stayed in bed,
but Edward was never really good at taking
care of anyone especially when they were sick
so Anne sent for her friend
Dorothy to come out and help.
I came as soon as I heard.
When I got there she was already
frail and was having difficulty breathing.
I just had a feeling she wasn't
going to make it though the night.
I tried to call Edward at his
office but there was no response.
I decided to call an ambulance
to take her to the hospital.
Apparently Edward had taken the phone off
the hook so that he wouldn't be disturbed.
So Dorothy sent her husband Mike
to the Indiana Project to get Edward
and bring him to the hospital.
By the time Mike drives him to
the hospital Anne had already died.
Edward was devastated.
It wasn't until after she died that we
found out she was suffering from polio.
Dr. Helen Cagle of John Hopkins
University is a specialist in the
treatment of infectious diseases.
We met with her to talk about the polio
epidemic in America during the 1940s and 50s.
In the summer of 1949 there was a serious
polio epidemic that swept through Indiana.
All public activities and gatherings were
banned to prevent the spread of the disease.
We think of polio as something
affecting young children, and infants,
but adults could contract
the disease as well.
Unfortunately Anne was one
of the unlucky ones who did.
Edward had no idea how sick she really was.
I told him he wasn't home enough to notice.
I thought Anne's death would
change him but it only made him worse.
Haunted by the death of his wife Edward
completely withdrew from everyday life
and spent his time in the lab.
Edward blamed himself for his wife's death.
I mean here he was a man of science
and he couldn't even save his own wife.
If he could invent a time machine
he could go back and save Anne.
He thought he could cheat
death through science.
All he needed was time.
Driven by remorse and regret Edward would
spend the next twenty years of his life
trying to find a way to travel through time.
By the 1960s the Indiana Project was
all but forgotten, due to the space race.
I mean, here we have NASA spending billions,
to beat the Russians to the moon,
but over here in Indiana still
Edward working in his little lab.
In the Fall of 1960 Edward's son
Richard follows in his father's
footsteps when he's accepted to MIT.
Richard and his father had an
unusual relationship since Anne's death.
Richard admired Edward, as a scientist,
and respected him as his father, but
they were never truly close.
Not as close as Richard wanted them to be.
Deep down I think becoming a physicist
was a way that Richard thought that
he could really connect with his father.
He had to get inside his world.
Richard graduates from MIT in 1968
and accepts a research position at
the University of Indiana.
When the space race was going on
NASA overshadowed everything,
including the Indiana Project.
It managed to survived just
simply by being under the radar.
But by the early 70s,
with the space race over
and Vietnam bleeding the
Pentagon dry, cuts had to be made.
That's when the Indiana Project
ending up on the chopping block.
Despite numerous letters from Edward
asking them to reconsider the idea
the Pentagon shuts down the
Indiana Project in the Fall of 1975.
To them they saw Edward as a relic
of the past, a crackpot, and they
thought his research was just a joke.
Edward was devastated. His
decades of research, his work, all gone.
It was like losing his wife all over again.
He couldn't take it.
On November 5th, 1975 Edward
Page suffers a major heart
attack and dies the following day.
He was 59 years old.
Richard takes the death of Edward very hard.
He waited his whole life,
he worked his whole life,
to have an opportunity to
spend some meaningful time
with him and it doesn't happen.
Richard returns to Portland after
Edward's death to sell his parent's home.
While cleaning out his parent's house
Richard makes an extraordinary discovery.
So Richard is boxing up his
father's personal belongings
when he finds a loose
floorboard under the bed.
Inside is his father's personal
journal detailing all of his
research into time travel.
Richard is blown away
by his father's journal.
He knew that Edward had been working for the
government and that his job was classified,
but he had no idea that this, was what he
was devoting his whole life toward.
In the journal Richard
finds a picture of his mother.
Written on the back, in his father
handwriting, is the message "In
time, I will save you."
That night Richard just
pours over his father's journal
and he realizes his father was very
close to making time travel a possibility.
This research was his father's legacy
and Richard took it upon
himself to prove his father right.
Taking up the challenge of his
father's work would prove to be more
difficult then Richard realized.
He would spend the next decade
trying to achieve his father's goal.
The idea of time travel is very seductive.
Richard started out to prove his
father's theories correct but it
soon became a personal obsession.
Like his father Richard withdrew from
society to completely focus on his work.
He rarely, if ever, seen outside the lab.
His students became very frustrated
he never showed up to class to
lecture he just showed up on test days.
Had Richard not continued his
father's journal this important
period in his life, and history itself,
would be a lost to us.
November 6th, 1985. I have
completed my father's legacy.
Forty years of combined research has
led me to construct a machine to move man
backwards and forward through time.
Today I became the first person to do so.
We know what Richard created
and we know that it worked.
But what we don't know, even to
this day, is how he did it.
He never reveals the secrets in his journal.
I can only imagine what
it must have been like...
...to have been there
when he actually did it.
The only thing we do know about
that night comes from the video
camera that Richard set up.
First there's the time machine itself.
It's surprisingly small, it looks
like two VCRs stacked on top of
each other with a controller.
Inspired by H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine"
Richard wanted something round
that could be turned either
direction to control the device.
His ultimate choice was quite appropriate
for the 1980s.
Richard Page built a time
machine out of an Atari!
Using the control knob of an Atari gaming
system Richard could
move himself through time.
Turning the controller to the
right sends you into the future.
Turning the knob to the
left sends you into the past.
The first time Richard uses the device
he decides to make only a very small jump.
He turns the knob and is
sent one minute into the future.
However Richard reappears to us
only a second latter.
This Richard is from the future.
Now this "Future Richard" waits exactly
one minute for the arrival of "Past Richard."
This "Future Richard" then tells "Past
Richard" to travel back in time one minute.
"Past Richard" travels back in
time to become "Future Richard."
Wrap your head around that.
Richard in his excitement of time
traveling and meeting himself,
decides to go back even further.
Without thinking it through Richard
decides to go back in time one day.
He turns the knob to the left, vanishes.
When he goes back in time one
day Richard fails to take into account
that there will not be a time machine waiting
for him because he has yet to complete it.
So he ends up spending the night
in a broom closet waiting for his
past self to finish the machine.
Richard quickly learned the
dangers of using such a device.
He realized that the
machine must be portable,
otherwise you could stuck in
the past with no way to come back.
To call Richard's achievement ground
breaking would be an understatement.
We are no longer bound to the rules of time.
But what of the rules of morality?
A machine that can alter history
is power that could be very
dangerous in the wrong hands.
Aware of the potential danger in
such a device Richard vows not to
go back in time and change things.
But he just can't help himself.
Pandora's Box has just been opened.
There was one thing that Richard always
wanted, and that was to see his mother again.
He has a machine that can do that
and not only can he see her again,
he doesn't have to lose her at all.
At the time that she died the Polio
vaccine was still several years away,
but in the 1980s that's no longer an issue.
Richard thinks long and hard
about what he plans to do.
He weighs the options, the pros,
the cons, but in the end he decides to do it.
Richard works for several months to
make a portable version of the time machine.
Unable to make it any smaller
Richard determines that the machine
would be something you wear like a backpack.
Now the machine only moves
you through time, not space.
You can't start off in New York
and go back in time to ancient Rome.
In order to do that you would
have to physically be in Italy.
Anne was born and raised
in Paterson, New Jersey
before her family moved to Boston
so Richard would need to go there first.
So he makes some calls and
tracks down the house she grew up in.
Acquiring a series of
polio and booster shoots.
Richard will travel back to the 1920s and
inoculate his newborn mother.
December 13th 1985. I am currently sitting
in a motel near my Mother's childhood home.
Polio vaccination and booster
shots lay on the table next to me.
In a few minutes I will use them to cure
my mother's illness and save her from death.
I write this with the knowledge
that my actions today may yield
unintended ramifications.
I only pray that it works.
It works. The time machine works.
December 5th 1987 will go down in history as
one of the most important dates for mankind.
Richard and Aden have
finally fulfilled their father's work.
It wasn't just a triumph for
mankind but a personal triumph as well.
However the triumph was to be short lived.
Immediately after their first successful test
Richard passes out.
Aden rushes his brother to his
hospital and begins treating him.
Even though he was a well
respected doctor Aden is stumped
by his brother's sudden illness.
He was concerned it might
be a side effect of the machine.
Now you have to remember that Aden
has only been working with the
device for the past few months.
Richard had been working
on it for thirteen years.
Aden was worried that there might
be some correlation with long
time exposure to the device.
Richard was in a comatose state
for three days. Aden was baffled.
On the third day Richard literally jumps
out of bed and happily embraces his brother.
Aden was taken aback. He said
Richard hugged him as if they
haven't seen each other in years.
Aden runs some test but finds
nothing medically wrong with his
brother and releases him that evening.
Returning to the lab Richard tells
his brother about a dream he had
while he was in the hospital.
It's a dream about their mother and
what their life would have been like
had she not died giving birth to Aden.
It's the one thing they
both have always wanted.
Aden more so because he never knew her.
It's the reason why he became a doctor.
Richard tells him, if a doctor had
been there when their mother went
into labor she wouldn't have died.
Aden begins to figure out where
Richard is going with this train of thought.
And he wants nothing to do with it.
He had a hard enough time with the
fact that his brother had actually
built a working time machine.
But to go back in time and deliver
yourself? It was just too much.
It's actually not that crazy
if you really think about it.
Richard and Aden debate throughout
the whole night until Aden
reappears. The machine works!
Aden has now become the
first person to travel through time.
Richard asks Aden what it
felt like to travel through time
but before he can say anything
Aden inexplicably passes out.
Richard takes Aden to the hospital where
he spends the next three days in a coma.
When Aden wakes up from his coma
he is by all accounts perfectly healthy.
The doctors can't find
anything wrong with him.
Medically speaking the cause of
Aden's coma remains unknown. There's
just very little evidence to go on.
The only rational explanation is
the time machine.
Curiously Richard is not at his
brother's bedside during those three days.
He only returns on the day that
Aden wakes up from the coma.
It's almost as if he knew what was going to
happen.
Considering he built a
time machine, maybe he did.
January 29th, 1990. I arrived at the
hospital this morning anticipating
the Aden would soon recover.
A few minutes after I entered his
room Aden wakes from his coma.
He told he understood what had
happened to him and what we needed to do.
Those fourteen years that Richard and Aden
spent while working together on the time
machine were leading up to an ultimate goal.
When Anne died they were
left with a cold and distant father.
They thought if only they could go back
in time and change one thing, just one,
everything else would work itself out.
Using the time machine they would go
back in time to 1953 and stop the car
accident that killed their mother.
They we're unprepared for
what was about to happen.
The time machine was on and it was stable.
Sixteen years after their father's death
his sons had completed his life work
and built the world's first time machine.
It is one of the great moments, if not the
greatest moment in the history of science.
The word history takes on
a whole new meaning now.
History is a living science because of
what they did.
Despite their accomplishments personal
tragedy casts a long shadow over their work.
Their mother's suicide in 1955
haunted them for the rest of their lives,
and I think it's what really drove
them, just like their father, to
try and create the time machine.
Edward was so obsessed with the
machine that he completely overlooked
the warning signs with Anne.
All her life she had been
plagued by terrible nightmares.
She had this reoccurring nightmare where she
was being repeatedly stabbed with needles.
She never understood why.
Even though Anne was a lovely person
and a wonderful mother she had a
dark side that was tormenting her.
After narrowly surviving a car wreck
in 53 Anne became a different person.
She confided in me that she never
understand why she was still here.
She thought she should have died
in the accident.
Edward quite sadly is oblivious
to his wife's pain and suffering.
He is so obsessed with creating
the time machine that he is
squandering the time he has.
In Edward's mind once he has the machine
built he'll have all the time in the world.
Unfortunately for Edward time ran out.
On February 29, 1956 after sending Richard
and Aden to school Anne commits suicide.
She was 35 years old.
She left a note saying it was
the only way to cure her illness.
Richard and Aden come home from
school and find their mother dead.
Richard was fourteen and Aden was only five.
I can't imagine what that
does to you, psychologically
and I have no doubt that it was on their
minds as they were finishing the machine.
The temptation was certainly there
for them to go back and to try and stop it
but Richard realize that the best way to
save their mother was through their father.
March 6th 1994. After much debate Aden
and myself have concluded that the reason
our mother committed suicide was the
that our father was never there for her.
His obsession with the machine
caused her to feel alienated and alone.
Had my father been able to complete
his research in her lifetime things
may have turned out differently.
We can only speculate what might have
happened had they actually tried to go back.
July 1944. Racing against
time the Indiana Project
works around the clock trying to find
the break through they desperately need.
The Manhattan Project was making
great strides with the atomic bomb
but the Indiana Project was falling way
behind, until Edward Page comes along.
Edward Page, a young researcher
who had been working in the
Indiana Project for several years,
stuns his colleagues when he not
only creates a series of equations
that would produce time travel
he builds a functioning prototype as well.
Edward's research was
years ahead of it's time.
We're still not sure how he was able
to reach the conclusions that he did.
People would ask him and he
just would say "It came to me."
As far as the military was concerned
we now possessed the power to
rewrite history as we saw fit.
They wanted to immediately go back
in time and assassinate Hitler.
End the war before it even starts.
Now in control of a power far
greater then the atomic bomb
the United States prepares to alter history
and avoid the horrors of World War II.
However President Roosevelt has
second thoughts and he orders the
Indiana Project to stand down.
He felt that altering time was too risky
and could have unintended ramifications.
Roosevelt was right that
we shouldn't be playing God.
Our responsibility was to see that time
travel doesn't fall into the wrong hands.
However it was already too late.
On January 17th, 1945 Soviet agents,
who had infiltrated the Indiana Project,
steal Edward's prototype
along with all of his research.
They plant a bomb that destroys
several buildings at the facility.
The spies manage to make their
way back to Moscow with the time machine.
If you thought the idea of Hitler
with an atomic bomb was a bad idea,
then Stalin with a time
machine was terrifying.
The Indiana Project was in shambles.
They say not to put all your eggs in
one basket, well the Indiana Project did.
The Soviets now had the golden goose.
Surviving the explosion with
minor injuries Edward was tasked
with rebuilding the prototype.
Unfortunately most of his research
and notes were either stolen or destroyed
and he claimed it would
take several years to rebuild it.
Several years they did not have.
From the ashes of World
War II a new conflict rose.
The Cold War.
The United States and the Soviet
Union had emerged from the war
as the two dominant superpowers.
Immediately a battle for ideological
and military supremacy began.
With the time machine the Soviets clearly
had an unbelievable advantage over us.
Fortunately for us we still had Edward.
Unfortunately Edward had not
yet built a functioning prototype.
Everyone was wondering what was
going on.
Edward kept saying his research
has been set back by several years
but by 1947 the Pentagon began
to become deeply concerned.
Edward had built a time machine
before. Why couldn't he do it again?
Suspicion was beginning
to mount. What was he hiding?
People began to suspect that
Edward could be working for the Soviets.
They pointed to the fact that
once the prototype was stolen he
conveniently forgot how to build it.
The FBI and the newly formed CIA had
both begin monitoring Edward's activity.
Anne wrote me in the fall of 47 about how how
strange Edward's behavior had been of late.
He had become quite paranoid and was
convinced that people were following him.
On June 20th, 1948 Edward
resigns from the Indiana Project
and takes a teaching job at
Marshall College in upstate New York.
Edward claimed he wanted to
spend more time with his family.
Anne was expecting their second child
and he wanted to move back East so
she could be closer to her parents.
The Pentagon was very troubled
when Edward left the Indiana Project.
Especially going into academia
where they felt he might run
into communist sympathizers.
In fact many of them felt it was
only a matter of time before
Edward ended up in Moscow.
Meanwhile recent developments
had convinced the Pentagon
that the Soviets were already
altering time for their own purposes.
We really can't comprehend what
the Soviets did to the fabric of time.
All that we know is that they beat
us at everything, things they
shouldn't have even known about.
Time travel was the
only possible explanation.
With the time machine the Soviets
could have gone back in time and
prevented America from ever existing.
But they were smarter then that.
They realized that if they alter
the past previous to Edward Page
inventing the time machine,
that he might never invent it at all.
Recent history however would be up for grabs.
The Soviets found the time machine
to be an invaluable tool for espionage.
The Pentagon would be developing
a new secret weapons system
and somehow the Soviets would have one first.
We would be developing a new aircraft
and before we could even approve a prototype
the Soviets would be flying the damn thing.
It became quite clear
what the Soviets were doing.
They would wait for us to develop something,
a new tank, missile system, whatever,
and Soviet spies would smuggle
the design back to Moscow.
Then the Soviets would use the machine to go
back in time and "invent" it before we did.
Sputnik was based from
an entirely American design.
The day the blueprints were finalized was the
same day the Soviets launched it into orbit.
The Pentagon was understandably
going ballistic but there wasn't
anything we could do about it.
The Indiana Project was lost
without Edward, but there wasn't
really anyone who trusted him.
Soon after Edward begins his new career
as a college professor in upstate New York
Anne gives birth to their second
son, whom they name Aden.
This was a relatively happy period for
the Page Family, despite the shadow of
suspicion hanging over Edward.
Edward was still convinced that he was being
followed and his paranoia frightened Anne
but as long as he was working in the basement
with the boys his delusions would subside.
Richard and Aden loved working
in the basement with Edward.
They would spend all their time
together. They love being Dad's assistants.
Richard and Aden would
follow in their father's footsteps
and become physicists as
well, both graduating from MIT.
When Richard and then Aden
moved out of the house to go to college
Edward was left alone in his lab.
His paranoia had again returned
and Anne became concerned.
Especially after the moon landing.
This is a special report from
KRNK News. The space race is over.
Man has landed on the Moon.
I've just been handed an update.
We have a message from, Yuri Gagarin,
the first man to set foot upon the moon.
It reads...
"It's one small step for Russia,
one giant leap for Communism."
It was bad enough to have
lost the Vietnam War in 68
but to have them beat us to the
moon, it was just salt in the wound.
It one of those moments
you just don't forget,
like when President Nixon was assassinated
in Dallas. We all remember where we were.
What was suppose to be America's greatest
triumph had become a national nightmare.
The moon landing really galvanized
Edward to want to rebuild the time machine.
America had started its decline, Soviets
had become the dominant superpower
and Edward was determine to rebuild the
machine, go back in time, and stop them.
As Edward secretly begins rebuilding
the time machine in his basement
Anne becomes ever increasingly concerned.
Edward would spend all of his time
down in the basement, Anne told me.
She would ask him what he was
up too and he wouldn't tell her.
He would become very defensive.
He told her that as long as she doesn't
know anything they couldn't hurt her.
She didn't know who "they" were.
Edward's concerns were
actually reasonably justified.
He had kept a low profile since
leaving the Indiana Project but the
CIA still had an open case file on him
and were waiting for him to
do something to raise a red flag.
The Soviets had also been
keeping an eye on Edward.
They had hoped that the bombing
of the Indiana Project back in 45
would have killed him as well,
but when he survived they feared he
would rebuild another time machine.
When Edward left the Indiana Project under
a cloud of suspicion the Soviets determine
that he would not attempt
to rebuild the machine.
But if he ever did he would become a major
threat.
Edward's work progresses but
without government resources
he lacks access to equipment
he desperately needs.
Edward decides to contact his sons for help.
By the mid 1970s Richard and
Aden were both working for MIT.
Richard was a teacher in the
physics department and Aden was a
researcher working at the university.
Edward needed access to equipment at
MIT in order to continue his experiments
but he'd have to tell Richard
and Aden what he was up to.
Edward tells them about the Indiana
Project and his involvement in the
creation of a time machine.
Richard and Aden aren't sure what to believe.
Now here's the part where the
story takes a really strange turn.
Edward tells Richard and Aden that
he did not invent the time machine.
They did.
Edward tells Richard and Aden that back in 44
when he was working for the Indiana Project
that two time travelers from the future
gave him the time machine
as well as their research papers.
He tells Richard and Aden that
they were the two time travelers.
Richard and Aden believed
their dad had gone crazy.
His paranoia had turned into a full
fledged delusion.
Edward asked if he could run some experiments
in Richard's lab. Richard said no.
So Richard and Aden take their father home.
They talk with their mother
about Edward's mental state and
how he needs psychiatric help.
Edward keeps insisting he's not crazy,
but no one will listen.
Edward was not going
to take no for an answer.
On the night of July 28th, 1975 Edward is
caught breaking into Richard's lab at MIT.
Edward is booked with breaking and entering
and is taken to the police for questioning.
When Edward was question by the police
they asked him what was he doing in the lab
and he told them he was
gathering things for a time machine.
He told them about the Indiana
Project, the time travelers,
and how KGB and CIA were keeping tabs on him.
Edward's arrest certainly drew
the attention of the CIA and the KGB.
The police records indicated that he
talked to them about the Indiana Project.
Now whether the police
believed it or not was irrelevant.
Edward was now a liability and the
Pentagon was afraid he would go to the press.
But who would believe him?
Edward is released into Richard and Aden's
custody and they take him home to Anne.
They discuss the possibility
of having Edward committed.
The next day Richard and Aden
meet with the university president
to discuss having the charges
against Edward dropped.
Richard and Aden are able to have
the charges dropped on the condition
that Edward gets psychiatric help.
They return to their parent's
home to tell them the good news...
...and that's when they found them.
They found Edward first in the kitchen.
One bullet to the temple. They found Anne in
a bedroom closet where she had been hiding.
Richard and Aden were devastated. They
took the death of their parents very hard
but circumstances remained unclear.
The police investigation
into Edward and Anne's death
ruled that the crime was a murder
suicide carried out by Edward,
a man suffering from serious delusions.
Aden and Richard remained skeptical.
Despite Edward's delusions
Richard and Aden just couldn't believe
that their father would murder
their mother and then kill himself.
It just didn't make sense. Too
many things just didn't add up.
This was no suicide. This was clearly
a coordinated hit on a high value target.
They never found finger prints on the gun.
Edward shoots himself in the head and
then wipes his own fingerprints from the gun?
Give me a break. This
was a complete cover up.
The only question is who
was behind it. The KGB or the CIA?
While the cause of Edward and Anne's
death would be shrouded in controversy
for Richard and Aden there was
little for them to do but try
to move on with their lives.
Twenty years later Richard and
Aden are contacted by a realtor
about selling their parent's home.
After their parent's death
Richard and Aden never went back.
The house was abandoned. It
fell into disarray as did much
of the surrounding neighborhood.
A corporation came in and begin buying
a lot of the property to build a factory
and Richard and Aden agreed to sell.
Richard and Aden return to their
parent's home the day before it
is scheduled to be torn down.
They spend several hours looking around
the house to see if anything is worth saving.
In their parent's bedroom, Richard,
makes an extraordinary discovery.
After stepping on an uneven
floorboard and prying it loose
Richard finds his father's journal.
Richard and Aden are floored by what they
read.
Their father had been telling
them the truth, the whole time,
about The Indiana Project, about
the Soviets, the spies, the KGB,
time travelers, everything.
Inside the journal Richard and
Aden find a photo of their parents.
Written on the back
is the message In time you will save us.
Richard and Aden realize what they must do.
Richard and Aden begin the
task of rebuilding the time machine.
Edward's journal would provided the
basic blueprints for building the machine
but they would have to fill in the blanks.
The reason Edward was not able to rebuild
the time machine was because he never
had a chance to reverse engineer it
before the Soviets stole it.
The journal was just a holy
grail of information but it was incomplete.
It would be up to then to
finish their father's work.
They used whatever they could
find to help build the machine.
Spare parts, old machines, things
that the university wouldn't miss.
They would have used
an Atari if they had one.
Richard and Aden's activity
draws the attention of the university.
It also draws the attention
of both the CIA and the KGB.
After Edward and Anne's "death" the KGB
kept tabs on Richard and Aden's activity.
For twenty years they monitored
them waiting on them to make a move.
Richard and Aden both begin to
spend all of their waking hours
working on the time machine
and their colleagues and
students at MIT begin to take notice.
Students complained that Aden
only showed up to class to give tests.
Richard, his colleagues
very worried about him,
that he was spending way too much
time on non-university related projects.
The blackout is what
really got them in trouble.
On the evening of March 8th,
1995 at approximately 7:43pm
a power surge causes
the MIT campus to go dark.
The source of the power surge
is traced back to Richard's lab
Richard and Aden are both brought
before the university President
and reprimanded for misusing school
equipment for their own purposes.
They're both placed on temporary suspension.
The blackout makes national headlines
and a CIA investigation concludes
that Richard and Aden are
building a new time machine.
That's when they decided to pay a visit.
On their way home from the
meeting with the university president
both Richard and Aden are intercepted by
the CIA and taken to an undisclosed location.
The CIA inform Richard and Aden
that they know they are trying
to rebuild the time machine.
They warn them that the KGB is aware of
their activities and will try to kill them.
The CIA offers them protection and
funding in exchange for the time machine.
Richard and Aden really don't have a choice.
It's an offer they can't refused.
The Indiana Project which had
been defunct for decades is reopened
as Richard and Aden
set up a new research lab.
Richard and Aden make great strives towards
completing the machine but they're under
extreme pressure from the Pentagon to do so.
They now know the intense scrutiny
their dad was under when he was in
their position all those years ago.
With unlimited government resources
Richard and Aden are able to fill in
the gaps in their father's research.
The problem that Edward was
having when he originally tried
to reverse engineer the machine
was that many of the components were
beyond the limits of 1940s technology.
Richard and Aden were able solve
these problems with relative ease.
On November 12th, 1996, fifty years
after Edward's time machine was lost
Richard and Aden successfully rebuild it.
Richard and Aden had no intention
of turning the machine over to the
Pentagon when they finished it.
Edward's journal made it
very clear what they should do.
Richard tells Aden that
he himself must do it alone.
The only question is would it work?
That's the question that we'll
never know the answer to.
The explosion that brought an end
to Edward's prototype also brought
an end to the Indiana Project.
With their research set back by
years and the war drawing to a close
the Pentagon permanently
shuts the project down.
Once the war was over the Pentagon saw no
reason to keep funding the Indiana Project.
Time travel?
I always thought that
sounded like a bunch of bull----.
Edward's research into time
travel had been the most promising
and had it not been for that accident it
could have been a much different story.
Who knows what could have happened?
There's so many unknowns, so many
possibilities, so many might have beens.
The Indiana Project teaches us what
is truly important about time and
that is making every second count.
The accident really woke Edward
up to what his priorities were,
and that was spending
time with the ones he loved.
Edward and his family move back to Boston
where he accepts a teaching position at MIT.
After giving birth to their second
child, Aden, Anne return to
research work in the late 1950s.
Richard would follow in his father's
footsteps and become a physicist.
Aden becomes a doctor
specializing in neurology.
After a short battle with cancer Edward dies
peacefully in his sleep at the age of 77.
Anne passes away two years later.
In 1996 after a failed experiment
Richard suffers a stroke
and slips into a coma where he
remains to this day under the
watchful eye of his brother.
We were so close to making
time travel a possibility.
It would have changed the world, but will
we rediscover it?
I think it's only a matter of time.
And when we do there's going
to be a lot of questions to answer.
One of the great things about
being a science fiction writer is
the possibilities of "What if?"
What if Edward Page had invented time travel?
How would that effect us?
We experience time as we
perceive it, but if time could be altered
and was being altered would we perceive
that? Would we? That's the big question.
Would we even notice?
But until such a time when man is able
to leave the boundaries of time and space
the history of time travel will remain
within the realm of science fiction.
For Science Fiction Television this
has been The Theory of Time Travel.