Rip Van Winkle (1910 film) Catskill Mountains hundreds of years before, and had never been heard of since. The gnomes give Rip some magic schnapps to drink, and under its influence he goes to sleep for 20 years. When he awakes, he is an old man and in ragged clothes. His dog is dead, and his rifle has rusted away. He makes his way as best he can back to the village, and his own home. But there no one knows him. He finds his wife married to another man, his daughter grown to womanhood, and most of his old friends dead and gone. Rip,
Time travel en fût jamais" (1770) by Louis-Sébastien Mercier, "Rip Van Winkle" (1819) by Washington Irving, "Looking Backward" (1888) by Edward Bellamy, and "When the Sleeper Awakes" (1899) by H.G. Wells. Prolonged sleep, like the more familiar time machine, is used as a means of time travel in these stories. The earliest work about backwards time travel is uncertain. Samuel Madden's "Memoirs of the Twentieth Century" (1733) is a series of letters from British ambassadors in 1997 and 1998 to diplomats in the past, conveying the political and religious conditions of the future. Because the narrator receives these letters from his guardian