The Chronic Argonauts

This story was the first work of fiction in which an explorer traverses time through the use of a man-made device a time machine rather than through magic, divine intervention, or a natural phenomenon such as sleep. HG Wellss The Chronic Argonauts, written seven years before his much more famous time travel work, The Time Machine. The mysterious Dr. Moses Nebogipfel arrives in a small Welsh town in 1887. The apprehensions of the simple rural folk eventually cause them to storm the inventors workshop in an effort to avenge perceived witchery. Nobody knows who he is or how he arrived, but his manner and his appearance soon make Dr. Nebogipfels name dreaded in the village. Nebogipfel escapes with one other person, the sympathetic Reverend Elijah Ulysses Cook, in what is later revealed to be a time machine. After having been missing for three weeks, Cook returns, aged many years older.