H. G. Wells was still a young, largely unproven writer in 1888 when he published The Chronic Argonauts in the Science Schools Journal — a rough, early sketch of an idea he couldn’t put down: a man who builds a machine to travel through time on purpose — turning time travel into a technological act rather than the dream, supernatural displacement or unexplained leap that had characterised much of the fiction before him. He would spend the next seven years rewriting that idea, abandoning it, and rewriting it again.