A Bad Trip in a Time Machine.

I’ve been beset rather a lot lately by an unusual fantasy. I imagine myself being in possession of a time machine and travelling back to Haworth in 1846, there to meet the Brontë sisters and bring them back to the 21^st century.

The first thing they see when they step out of the vehicle is an aeroplane flying overhead. Inevitably they ask the question: ‘What the hell is that?’, only in a form of words to which young, genteel women of the mid-19^th century would be more accustomed. Fortunately, the question of how an aeroplane manages to fly is a matter of simple physics and so is relatively easily explained.

Then I take them for a drive in the car. They’re fascinated and terrified in equal measure by the speed, the volume of traffic, and the complexity of modern road systems, but most of all they want to know how the car manages to move without a locomotive on the front. That’s not too difficult either because the internal combustion engine works largely as a steam engine does, only using a small explosion to depress the pistons rather than steam power. That’s how the engine manages to be so much smaller.

OK, then it’s back home where I switch an electric light on. It seems like magic to the Brontës, of course, and so I have to explain how electricity travels through cables and causes an incandescent element to glow brightly. So far so good, but then comes the first truly difficult bit: what exactly is electricity? Now I’m struggling. Wouldn’t you be? How many of we lay persons truly know exactly what electricity is?

It gets worse when I boot up the computer and demonstrate simple things like word processing and spreadsheets, because now we’ve moved beyond electricity and into electronics. And what about the internet with its websites, multifarious educational resources, emailing, zoom meetings, social media facilities and so on? I have to go into binary form and the transmission of digital data, only I can’t because I haven’t a clue. And at some point the satellites orbiting the earth are going to come up…

And this is just the first hour of their trip to the 21^st century. There’s plenty more to come yet and the fond dream is already turning into a nightmare. Time to wake up, I think.

But at least I learned something: how little we modern humans know about the things we all take for granted. It’s become a world of specialists, those elevated cognoscenti on whom we’ve come to rely to smooth our path through the business of functioning and belonging. I’ve begun to envy the simple ways of yesteryear, while knowing that there’s no way back except by taking a trip in the only time machine we have at our disposal: the 19^th century novel. Maybe that’s part of the reason why they remain so popular.