Gallery: A Brief History of Time-Traveling Gadgets
01modern-times
Filmmaker George Clarke recently discovered a clip that some people believe is evidence of time travel. It appears in the DVD extras from Chaplin's *The Circus*, and shows a woman in the background using what appears to be a cellphone. Since the footage was shot in 1928, that's an anachronism to say the least. The discovery excited not just the blogosphere, who are ready to gawk at and dismiss anything the least bit interesting, but news-hungry cable TV, which presented it as news with about as much journalistic scrutiny as Ron Burgundy gave the water-skiing squirrel in *Anchorman.* If it were a one-time thing, we'd chalk it up to a fluke. But we've seen this before. "Time Traveler Captured on Film" has graduated from meme to trope. There's something about the juncture of photography, consumer tech, history (near and far) and our readiness to believe in conspiracies, science fiction and the occult that leads us to fall for this shtick over and over again. In this gallery, we're going to examine purported physical evidence of time travel, or our belief in time travel. And our point of departure is the actor and filmmaker — shown above in his classic *Modern Times* — whose films are still tramping their way through *our* modern times.
02timetraveler
*The Circus* Premieres ---------------------- Clarke explains his discovery in this video. In the background of this shot of the premiere of *The Circus*, a middle-aged woman walks by and appears to talk into a cellphone. The film and the gestures look real enough to be convincing. But part of the problem with black-and-white photography, and the reason it's so amenable to playing tricks on the eye, is that the shadow makes it unclear whether she's actually holding anything in her hand at all. If she is actually holding a device, *The Atlantic*'s Nicholas Jackson has a [much more reasonable explanation](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/11/debunking-the-charlie-chaplin-time-travel-video/65486/) than either a cellular phone or time travel: She's using an early hearing aid, one of a handful of models developed and released in the 1920s.
03foxnews
Cable News Outfoxed ------------------- What's amazing about the reaction to the cellphone time-traveler story is the credulity with which it was received -- even by outfits like MSNBC and Fox News. But I think I can explain it. Photography and time travel are bound together. Photographs can be tampered with, but they are a physical record of light reflecting off an object. We're conditioned to believe in their reality. Simultaneously, though, by fixing human beings in time, documenting their presence at the time and place of the picture, photographs allow that ephemeral image to live forever. [*Back to the Future*](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/11/1105back-to-the-future/) isn't a documentary, but it tells us something about how we think about this technology. It isn't an accident that in the film, the photograph of Marty and his siblings acts as the indicator of space-time's disruption. Think about that paradox for a moment: the photograph travels through time, the people in the frame vanish, but the picture (now of background) somehow persists. The space-time continuum can tear itself apart, but somehow the photograph's facticity (factuality? factiness?) lives on.
04hipster
Bridge to the Future -------------------- The funny thing about the recent hubbub about the time traveler in the Chaplin film is that we went through all of this just six months ago. This 1940 photograph of a Canadian bridge reopening seemed to reveal a modern twenty-something hipster in a contemporary outfit. Some of the blog posts even have the same headlines. So it's not just technology that fools us, but clothing, too. Of course, all of this photographer's clothes and equipment were available and in use in 1940. But we seem to be have trouble registering anything that disrupts our image of the past as fundamentally different from the present.
05himes-imbroglio-550
Pluperfect PDAs --------------- Nor is this some weird, 2010, let's-all-get-stoked-about *Back to the Future* thing. Last year, HiLobrow's Josh Glenn spotted what looked like a smartphone on the cover of a late-1960s Chester Himes novel. Then he found black rectangular objects in films like *Platinum Blonde (1931)* and *Laura (1944).* Glenn even has a name for these supposed time-traveling gadgets: "[Pluperfect PDAs](http://hilobrow.com/2010/10/28/another-pluperfect-pda/)."
06swiss-watch-inside-400-year-tomb
Watch Out --------- When you go back further, beyond the 20 century, it's usually not photographs of people that disrupt our sense of synchrony, but things. This small watch, labeled "Swiss" and thought to be about 100 years old, was found in a sealed, 400-year-old tomb in China. There's a geographical disruption here, too. How did this thing get from Switzerland to China 400 years ago? Of course, it didn't -- somehow, perhaps during an earlier dig, it wound up inside a Ming Dynasty tomb. But that doesn't keep the mind from wandering. Watches, like photographs, always seem impossibly linked to time.
07antikythera-mechanism
Antikythera ----------- The Greek antikythera was a mystery for years, an [intricately complex piece of machinery](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/12/2000-year-old-a/) that scholars eventually concluded was used for astronomy. The FAQs at the Antikythera Mechanism web site includes "Is the Antikythera evidence of time travel?" The answer, of course, is no. It's evidence that our precursors were much more capable and much more like us than we usually give them credit for.
08inca-stone
Peru's Ica Stones ----------------- Peru's Ica Stones appear to show human figures juxtaposed with dinosaurs and modern medical procedures. Which makes sense, right? I mean, if time travelers did exist, they wouldn't just jump from our near-future to our near-past. They'd probably be from way in the future, and do a lot more hopping around. I mean, this isn't *Quantum Leap*, where time travelers are inexplicably and artificially tied to baby boomers' memories of the recent past. They've got the budget. So why not go check out some dinosaurs, then hop over to a modern hospital, then back to ancient Peru?
09fuente-magna
Fuente Magna Bowl ----------------- The Fuente Magna bowl found in Bolivia contains marks that are thought to be a proto-Sumerian cuneiform script. If the bowl was brought to South America by an ancient Mesopotamian culture, this would be among the earliest possible pre-Columbian points of contact between the New World and the Old. Or time-traveling hipster forgot it there. Can't rule it out.
10paul-gauguin-660
*Tahitian Women* With iPod -------------------------- A Wired.com staffer and his partner visiting San Francisco's de Young Museum noticed something unusual in Paul Gaugin's 1891 painting *Tahitian Women on the Beach*, now on loan from the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. That's got to be an iPod in the sand, next to the red-clad woman's right hand. It's even attached to an earbud with a cable (which is more visible in the oil-on-canvas original). Think about it: Paul Gaugin, French, 1848-1903. Jules Verne, French, 1828-1905. Need we say more? *Image source: [Wikimedia Commons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_Gauguin_056.jpg).* __Do you have evidence of other time-traveling gadgets? Let us know in the comments!__
