CHAPTER 1
1957 — NOW
I'd never been frightened of anything in my life, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that my stomach had a bad case of the flip-flops just standing there in the middle of the night, the street pretty much deserted save for the occasional car going by.
The street was glistening with the rain that had been steadily coming down all night, the few neon lights that were still lit reflecting up at me like some alternate universe that was beckoning me to enter.
It had been years to get to this moment. They'd all become a blur, the years, one after another, but it had all led to right here and right now. In a few minutes I'd know if everything I'd been working toward would stand the test of time, to coin a phrase that was, if everything worked as planned, about to take on a whole new meaning.
I guess I was what they called a child prodigy or whatever they called weird kids who just knew things or did things that other kids or even some adults couldn't do. I never thought much about it, it just came easily, a gift from somewhere. Some kids were good at playing sports, I was good at playing quantum mechanics, math, physics, and anything to do with science.
Why? Why me? Who knew? Mozart was composing at five and wrote his first symphony at seven. There was no explaining it, it just was. Of course, child musical prodigies sometimes got great acclaim and attention and fawning. Science and math whiz kids mostly got ridicule and no friends. Other kids didn't like that a six-year-old could divide eight digit numbers in his head while they were mastering addition and subtraction and trying to form coherent sentences, and not very well at that. My father would parade me in front of his friends, like some parlor trick. They were both mesmerized and put off by a six-year-old who had the ability to outthink them.
I'd grown up in Burbank, when Burbank was a lazy little town of budding businesses and a lot of empty land. We lived in the Magnolia Park section in a pleasant little house my father had bought when he and my mother had moved there in 1931, the year my father had begun working at Lockheed, next to the United Air Field over on Hollywood Way.
I'd come along a year later, a happy accident my mother would say. I was an insatiably inquisitive child, always asking questions no one could answer, and I was a voracious reader as well. I read everything I could get my hands on. I loved the books by H.G. Wells and Jules Verne most of all, because they conjured up worlds that were so different from my own. I also read scientific books as if they were ABC books. I devoured those. My mother would look at those books, shake her head and say, "I made a regular Einstein."
I hadn't minded school at all. In fact, if it weren't for all the nasty little kids belittling me relentlessly, I would have loved it. High school was better, thanks to the math and science classes, which I couldn't get enough of. While my fellow students struggled with their algebra, then geometry, I breezed right through those things easily, occasionally even surprising my teachers. As I said, it was a gift I was lucky to have been given.
Right after high school I went to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. It was like coming home for me, and not a day went by when I didn't love being at Caltech, working on problems and projects, sparring with my teachers, and graduating at the very top of my class.
It hadn't all been easy, of course. When I was ten, my mother died from cancer. It had come on swiftly at the end of 1941. They'd tried the new chemotherapy drugs on her, drugs made from nitrogen mustard and folic acids, but they did nothing to stop what had rapidly spread throughout her entire body.
She spent her last month at the newly opened St. Joseph Hospital on Buena Vista. On the day she passed, I sat with her — my father had been there all night and had left for an hour to shower and get a change of clothes. She was in and out of consciousness — sometimes talking to herself, sometimes just lying there quietly, her breath coming in raspy spurts.
My mother had always believed in me and encouraged me and loved me as much as any mother could love a son. She'd been so vibrant and beautiful that seeing her like this — thin and gaunt and ravaged by this horrible disease, looking a decade or two older than her thirty-two years — made me want to scream at the doctors that they should have had a cure. We weren't living in the Middle Ages, this was 1942, how could they have not found a cure?
At some point, she turned and looked at me with such love in her eyes that I almost couldn't stand it. She took my hand and squeezed it as tightly as she could and said, "Hey, Einstein, do something important." An hour later she was gone.
I remember walking out of St. Joseph with my father. As we came into the bright sunshine, I looked across the street and there was the newly built Walt Disney Studios. My mother had taken me to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and we loved it so much we stayed to see it a second time. And now the man who made that movie had a studio right there in Burbank, right across from where my mother had just died at thirty-two. I wondered if Walt Disney knew how many lives his movie had touched. Right now, seeing the studio, it seemed like a bond between my mother and me and Walt Disney.
At that moment, I could not possibly have known or even imagined that one day, about a month after graduating Caltech, sitting in my room, looking at the paper pinned to my wall, the one I'd written in my very neat ten-year-old handwriting, the paper with my mother's words staring back at me — "Hey, Einstein, do something important" — wondering what exactly I was going to do with my life and what the future held for me, that the phone would ring and the voice on the other end would say, "This is Walt Disney calling."
It was 1954. As it turned out, one of my professors at Caltech had recommended me to Walt Disney, who was in the process of making a reality of a bold new adventure, a dream to make a new world called Disneyland. Walt, as he told me he liked to be called, was looking for people to help him realize his dream. He called them Imagineers, a combination of imagination and engineering.
"I hear you're pretty good with ideas and making things happen," Walt had said. "How'd you like to come work here?"
It was the perfect question at the perfect time. And so I joined WED Enterprises as an Imagineer, WED being the initials of Walter Elias Disney.
Walt was a fountain of ideas and the Disneyland plans were well under way — the first Imagineers had been with him since 1952, and they were barely six months away from the park opening. My first day at the studio, Walt himself walked me around the lot, introduced me, and then showed me everything they were working on, all the different rides and places and lands. Of course, the land that was immediately of interest to me was Tomorrowland. Walt must have seen the glimmer in my eye right away. Walt could always see the glimmer.
He had the ideas, he was the dreamer, and the Imagineers were the ones who had to figure it all out. But from that very first meeting, Walt knew that he was dealing with someone a little different. I became Walt's odd man out, I became Walt's secret weapon, the one Walt turned to when he wanted the impossible to be possible. I worked away from the other Imagineers. That's the way Walt wanted it and that's the way it was.
It had been a real horse race, but Disneyland opened on time. A year and a half later it was still going strong, packed with children and parents who suddenly felt like children again, going from Main Street to Fantasyland to Adventureland to Frontierland to Tomorrowland, riding the rides, having the adventures, and loving the happiest place on Earth.
Of course, not everything Walt wanted had happened by opening, and the Imagineers continued working on things that would happen when they were ready and not before. I didn't feel like I'd contributed all that much to that initial phase of Disneyland, just a few ideas here and there. No, Walt had me working on one specific thing, one ride he was especially keen on.
In its essence, the concept was simple: Walt wanted a "thrilling ride" the likes of which had never even been dreamed of before. That was Walt. Walt always wanted something that had never been dreamed of before.
And when Walt told me the idea, I guess he could once again see the glimmer in my eye, only this time it wasn't just a glimmer; the glimmer had the wattage of one of those huge lights they used down on the Disney stages.
It was to be a time-travel ride. A leap forward in time to the future, so that the travelers on the ride would get a glimpse into what might lie in store for them decades from now. The only real direction Walt gave me was that it all had to be plausible, it all had to be real and believable in every one of its aspects.
Even though he loved the Wells book, The Time Machine, for Walt that was pure fantasy and fancy, and he didn't want that — he didn't want some advanced civilization of Elois or Morlocks that had no real relevance to an audience of the 1950s. That was science fiction, and while the ride would certainly be science fiction, Walt knew that to have the impact and wonder he wanted, it simply had to be based in some kind of reality.
We discussed it almost weekly from the time I'd started. We'd meet and then Walt would go about his business and I'd go about mine. Whenever I had an idea, I'd develop it to the point I felt comfortable. If Walt liked the idea, his response was always the same: "That'll work." From Walt, "that'll work" was high praise.
The first part of the ride, the launch point, came fairly easily. It was not going to be cheap to do, but if done right it would be very effective. The travelers, some number of visitors that would optimize what it would take for the ride to be efficient and profitable, would sit in special seats inside a fancifully designed kind of time travel machine, loaded with gizmos and doodads, facing a huge movie screen that would envelop them, rather like the amazing Cinerama screen down at the Warner Hollywood.
The projected footage would be shot in one of the new 65mm processes, most likely Todd-AO, with its amazing and lifelike thirty-frames-per-second image. I'd been to see Oklahoma! at the Egyptian Theater and couldn't believe the clarity. It was like a window to the world or, as the ads put it, "You're in the show with Todd-AO!" That's what I wanted for this stage of the ride. Something with unbelievable clarity and vividness to propel our travelers through time and space.
The first series of images would be the world the travelers were in, but carefully done so that the footage wouldn't become dated too quickly. The rest of the images would be the work of the animators, with all kinds of colors and shapes and weird designs, whizzing and whirling in complicated patterns, mixed with buildings torn down and new buildings rising, all going very fast, as if to suggest they were going through some kind of wormhole or time portal.
During this phase of the ride, the visuals would be visceral and exciting, and there would also be music and maybe even some narration, explaining time travel's various theories.
Of course, I'd read up on everything, and some things I already knew and had known from an early age — theoretical physics combined with quantum mechanics or Einstein-Rosen bridges, traversable wormholes, time dilation, and on and on.
Over the years, many great minds had theories about time travel. I, too, loved the idea of time travel but knew theories were just theories. But the romantic notion of achieving it was irresistible to me, and both Walt and I knew it would be irresistible for the travelers. Who wouldn't love the idea of seeing what their future world would look like?
Once that part of the ride was done, the travelers would leave their seats and enter the second part of the ride, and there they would be treated to a vision of the future and what things might be like many decades hence.
Using Walt's wanting to keep everything in the realm of possibility, I'd settled on six decades ahead. While that was an eternity away, I felt pretty strongly that while the world would have certainly evolved, while technology would have produced some wondrous things, while science and medicine would have made great strides, it would still, in essence, be the world of today but with all those advances.
I'd come up with a few ideas of what might be attainable in six decades, but every time I came up with them I'd start to question myself. I worried and wondered if I was stepping outside the realm of the possible. I really wanted to get it right, but who knew what right was? Yes, I was an Imagineer imagining but I had no idea if my imaginings were half-baked, crazy, or just plain stupid.
I was pretty sure there wouldn't be flying cars or anything like that. That was the kind of thing that was popular in boys' science fiction novels, but would they have somehow figured out a way to do it in sixty years? Doubtful.
Nor did I want to have the people of the future dressed in weird tin foil or wacky fabrics. Clothing was clothing, and while I'd watched the styles change from when I was a kid to now, it was still recognizable as clothing. Pants were pants — not so baggy, not so much material — shirts were shirts, shoes were shoes. Oh, I knew there'd be changes in styles but I felt that not only would they not be far-fetched, I suspected that old styles would become new styles and come back in favor.
Would people have Dick Tracy two-way wrist radios? At least that was in the realm of the possible because so much of that kind of thing was happening so fast. We already had small transistor radios we could carry with us. Who was to say you couldn't have a communication device you could wear like a watch, to communicate with others? It really hadn't been all that long that radio had given way to television, a medium Walt had embraced and which had helped make his name even more of a household word than it already was. Yes, there would be leaps in communication, I was sure of it. But what leaps?
I also felt that computers would somehow play a big part in the future. I'd read all about the ENIAC computer, that huge behemoth that was completed in 1946 — that computer occupied one thousand square feet, used around eighteen thousand vacuum tubes, and weighed thirty tons. Some people I knew from Caltech believed that the ENIAC in its first ten years had done more calculation than all of humanity had up until that time. Then there'd been the Univac and the IBM 701 and the Whirlwind — who could keep up with it and where was it going and, most importantly, where would it be sixty years from now?
But as 1956 went on I knew Walt was getting impatient with me. He wanted to finalize everything and get the animators to work, and the engineers planning.
I'd sit in my office with the reams of drawings I'd done, all the concept drawings, and while some of them were probably fine, I knew some were just silly and frankly ridiculous.
I can't remember when the idea first came to me, the idea that to be truly accurate about what the world would be in sixty years that I should just damn well go there. But once it came to me it would not let go. After all, I was making a time travel "thrilling" ride and it's not like I hadn't read everything there was to read about time travel. I began to obsess over the idea of real time travel — not a ride, not fiction, but actual time travel.
I spent a month re-reading everything I could, every theory, every supposition, every flight of fancy. I filled notebooks with ideas, calculations, and even my pathetic crude drawings. A thinker I might have been, an artist I wasn't.
In fiction, there was always a device, a machine or whatever "thing" that would be used to propel the time traveler forward or, more frequently, backward. Going forward meant that the time paradoxes of going backward wouldn't be an issue because you weren't going to change anything, you weren't going to interfere with the past so that it would affect the present. In the future, the past was the past so you couldn't affect it, although I guess you could affect the future beyond the future you were in. It was like a vast maze of mirrors.
I'd arrive at the studio at 7:00 and wouldn't leave until late in the evening. I'd get home, I'd try to sleep, but couldn't because my mind wouldn't shut down, wouldn't stop.
