The minute description of the time machine is perfect as it allows the reader to travel in their imagination.
On a personal level, what I would like to understand is how Herbert managed to describe the theory of relativity before Albert Einstein, and for all of you who are wondering if I think the novel may be reporting information that could have happened. The answer is yes, there are many things in the book that are beyond imagination.
Synopsis
Faced with the skepticism of his friends, a scientist at the end of the 19th century manages to discover the keys to the so-called "fourth dimension" (Time) and builds a vehicle that allows him to physically travel through it. Meanwhile his friends meet at his house, but on one occasion the host does not appear. After waiting for a while, his friends see him enter a dire state. He tells them the story of how he traveled through time: with the intention of knowing the future of humanity, he traveled to the year 802,701, but far from finding a society in the fullness of its development, he sees a world in decline inhabited in its surface by hedonistic beings (the Eloi), but without writing, intelligence or physical strength. The Traveler supposes that this is how he must have ended humanity after resolving all his existential conflicts, however, shortly after he discovers that these beings live with an immense fear of the underground and of the dark. The subsoil is dominated by sinister creatures, the Morlocks, another branch of the human species that has become accustomed to living in the dark and comes out at night to feed on the Eloi it captures. After doing some explorations around his arrival in the future, he returns to the place where he left the time machine, but it is gone; he later finds out that the Morlocks have locked her in the pedestal of a statue representing a Sphinx located in the place where the Time Traveler appeared. He tries his best to find a way to get her back, and comes across a huge building, the Palace of Green Porcelain, a museum in ruins. There he collects tools to open the bronze doors on the pedestal of the sphinx statue, but when he returns he finds that it is already open. He enters it, finds his machine, and discovers it was all a trap, but escapes with his machine before the Morlocks capture him. After leaving this era, the protagonist continues his journey advancing even further in time until he reaches the disappearance of life on planet Earth and, finally, the extinction of the Sun itself. Exhausted and frightened, he returns to his time and tells him the story to their peers. Nobody believes his story, but the narrator returns the next day and sees how the traveler takes certain things from his laboratory (among them a camera) and leaves for the future. The narrator, present at the Voyager's escape, comments that this happened more than three years ago. At the end of the story he states that he is still waiting for the Traveler.
