The Time Machine Technology and Modernization Quotes

The Time Traveller assumes that technology will keep getting better and better. It's like he's never heard of the Dark Ages and doesn't understand that technological advances can be lost. This assumption that technology will keep getting better is very much like the assumption that human life will keep getting better. Wells is teaching the reader that progress isn't a given by showing his protagonist learn that very lesson.

Here's a technology that we normally don't think of as technology: shoes! Usually we only notice technology like this when (as here) something goes wrong. Again, the Time Traveller is badly prepared for this trip because he doesn't have the right equipment. (Wells actually wrote a pamphlet titled "The Misery of Boots" (which is all about how bad-quality boots make people miserable – and that it doesn't have to be that way.)

Writing is one of the many technologies that the Eloi have lost. Here again we see how technology becomes noticeable when it fails (neither the Time Traveller nor Weena can read this writing). It's kind of like when we read an older book, like this one, versus a more recent one: when the reading is more difficult, we become more conscious of the work that this sort of technology requires.