Nobody had thought of a time machine until H.G. Wells first wrote about it in 1895. But as soon as the novel The Time Machine came out, others quickly picked up on the concept and put their own spin on the machine that could travel through time. So the DeLorean could take its passengers through time, and also the TARDIS and also the Hot Tub Time Machine.
However “obvious” something seems today, every little thing had to be invented once, including the tiniest detail you can think of.
Before someone came up with the idea of a corridor, people lived in houses where rooms opened from other rooms like you see in museums today. Go ahead and say duh — but when the first Roman patrician built corridors in a villa, it was just as forward looking in their time, as Singapore’s sustainable breathing walls are in ours.
You’d think that something as basic and ubiquitous as the equal sign, one of the world’s most recognized symbols and one of the most frequently used concepts in mathematics, is as old as time itself. But you’d be surprised to learn that it was introduced as late as 1557, by the Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde, who, as rumor has it, came up with the “emoji” because he got tired of writing “is equal to” all the time.
Big or small, every feature of our world had to be invented at some point. Sometimes they’re reinvented again and again—which is how we got the phrase “reinventing the wheel.” (Excuse the nit: technically, what we’re reinventing most of the time is the axle.)
Innovation as broccoli
During grocery shopping, I sometimes shout “Let’s buy a fractal,” and I don’t even mean it as a joke.
If you look at Romanesco broccoli (some may call it Romanesco cauliflower), you can see that it really is a naturally occurring fractal, with its buds forming a logarithmic spiral that displays self-similarity at various scales.
Setting this aside aside, in his book Scale, theoretical physicist Geoffrey West draws an interesting parallel between the fractal nature of innovation and biological systems.
The idea is that innovations, like fractals, show self-similarity at different scales. Just as a small branch of a tree resembles the whole tree’s structure, small innovations often mirror the pattern of larger, breakthrough discoveries. Each innovation creates new possibilities for further ones, branching out in a fractal-like pattern of development.
Time machine spinoffs
Wells’ Time Machine didn’t introduce the concept of time travel—it merely put it in a new context. While earlier stories had flirted with the idea via dreams or mystical forces, Wells married the idea with science and engineering, giving time travel a plausible framework in the Industrial Age.
This shift was a kind of cognitive “phase change”—a point where scattered ideas suddenly align into a coherent new concept. And from that seed sprouted countless variations, each echoing the original blueprint while morphing into something new.
The fractal nature of innovation becomes evident in how subsequent authors built upon Wells’ framework. Each new iteration—from Asimov’s temporal mechanics to Zemeckis’ DeLorean—represents a similar pattern, preserving the core concept of mechanical time travel while adding new layers of complexity and interpretation. Just as each small bud in a head of Romanesco broccoli follows the same mathematical principles as the whole, each new time machine story carries the imprint of Wells’ original vision.
Which takes me to at least one breakthrough that emerged from nowhere.
E.T. Bell, when writing about the 16th-century mathematician John Napier, notes:
“The invention of logarithms came on the world as a bolt from the blue. No previous work had led up to it, foreshadowed it, or heralded its arrival. It stands isolated, breaking in upon human thought abruptly without borrowing from the work of other intellects or following known lines of mathematical thought.”
Did someone say time travel?
(Much of this post appeared first in Psychology Today.)
